And clearly, what you are saying is helping.
This is correct as far as I know. Images were turned off, but then we discovered that posting an external image URL would still work. Rather than attempt to figure out how to stop that, we were told to just try it out and see if it was okay.
It seemed no one abused the image feature (which was the reason it was shut off before–due to goat.se, in fact), so we kept things the way they are now.
The issue being reported, however, is just that sometimes Discourse won’t make a thumbnail of a particular site or image or video, and it returns this error.
My suspicion is just that Discourse fails to import the thumbnail, and then gives out a “You can’t embed media items in a post” error instead of a more correct “failed to retrieve thumbnail, please try again” error.
Perhaps this is due to the attempt to block media uploads. I could see that messing up an error handling routine.
Let’s not get personal. Both of you please drop the attacks back and forth.
What is being done is very simple.
- Copy video/photo URL.
- Paste into response box.
- Press “Reply”.
As simple as that. It works most of the time, but sometimes doesn’t, and doing the absolute exact same thing on a different browser works.
My guess is it’s these two things combined. The admin of the SDMB tried to block images, and because Discourse isn’t designed to do that, the admins of the SDMB came up with a script of some kind that doesn’t block all images, only some of them.
I think it’s worth evaluating what the actual goal is here:
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Is the goal to enforce a completely text-based, image free discussion?
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Is the goal to discourage images in discussion?
If it is the latter, I think the status quo is… working about as ok as it’s ever gonna work, since this is not a scenario we ever designed for, honestly.
(I personally don’t agree with this goal because I believe it’s unrealistic to have an image-free discussion on today’s internet… but I am not in charge here.)
Whose goal? I don’t know what the goal of the admin was here originally, but it’s not the goal of at least some of the mods to have image free discussion or even discourage images in discussion because they’re asking how to add them.
Maybe the mods could get together and let us know what their goal about images is.
Are you referring to me? I’m just trying to be helpful in this thread. Also, i don’t make the rules, i just try to help enforce them. If it were up to me the site would host photos. But tptb don’t want to do that, and i try to respect the rules.
I think the initial goal was to reproduce the text-only style of the old forum. But posters quickly learned that discourse often displays linked posts. And our unfortunately no longer admin, Tubadiva, decided to let posters do that so long as the images were appropriate, as something of an experiment, to be halted if we started to get nasty images. But no hosting. Then Tubadiva died, and no decisions have been made since.
At least, that’s my understanding of how we got to where we are.
The reason for no inline images was because it’s ripe for abuse. You can post anything you want and it’s unavoidable for others to see, no matter what it is (or it could contain malicious code). It also used to crash browsers back then, but that’s less of an issue these days.
I think a lot of that good-intentioned playful flaunting of rules that occasionally took place in the early days (to the point of annoying) no longer has novelty value and we’ve all matured out of it, but that’s for us old timers. Who knows what might happen when there’s a more visible generational shift, and it’s all rowdy teens, with their leather jackets, transistor radios, and long hair.
I remember you saying that you wanted to be able to post a graph in a study in another thread, so yes, I was partly referring to you. But I seem to remember other mods putting up pictures also.
That’s my understanding as well. Except I’m not sure that explains why some linked images work and others don’t.
From what I’m gathering from some of the other posts, there may be ways to get around the block. IF (big if ) that’s true, would that be amenable to tptb as long as the SDMB doesn’t host the images?
We are working on this behind the scenes with the Powers That Be, because I generally agree that some of the configuration options here right now just – in my opinion – don’t make a whole lot of sense.
Thank you! Much appreciated.
[insert picture of a thank you with a smilie face here]
Well, as far as “smilie face” you have unicode emoji for that… 
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in Windows press win+. to access the emoji chooser
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in OS X press cmd+ctrl+space
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in mobile, press the emoji button on the keyboard to access the emoji chooser
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the Discourse editor also has a web based emoji chooser via the smile face on the toolbar
Thanks, Unicode consortium!
Hmm… interesting. The only time I’ve ever gotten that error is when I accidentally cut and pasted an image instead of an image URL. Meaning, I right clicked on the image I wanted to post, clicked on “Copy Image” instead of “Copy Image URL” and when I pasted it, text would show up with an image tag and a file name, but the preview would have the error mentioned in the OP.
Otherwise, I’ve never seen that error message. A plain URL always previews and posts fine for me. It’s when I’m in a hurry and copy the wrong thing that I see that.
It may indeed be as simple as that. I’m just hoping for some official confirmation that that’s the trigger.
Test.
Ok, I managed to get the can’t embed media in post another way. The normal way above shows fine. Just a bare URL. But I did the url nested in [ img ] tags like you do on some other boards and it gave me the error when I put the URL between those tags. Now that I think of it, that happened to me before as the other board I visit does images that way, and it’s force of habit for me to do inline images that way.
Well, now you know not to do that,and how to fix it if you do and Discourse complains
It’s Discourse. Most of your previous forum habits have no applicability here.
Um … no duh. I’m trying to help the OP out with possible reasons they are getting the error message. I like Discourse.