How to avoid the YouTube posting bug

Dr.Strangelove
Fri, 20 Sep 2024 00:46:34 +0000
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You’re trying to post a YouTube video, but you get a popup saying “You can’t embed media items in a post.” Here’s how to avoid that. There are a couple of minor variations.

I haven’t written my post yet

Write your post normally but do not include the YouTube link(s). When you are satisfied with the post, hide the preview window (see the << button in the lower-right). Then, insert the links in the desired locations. Note that the links should each appear on a line by themselves. Then post.

Are you still getting the error? Then you must perform an additional modification. Again keeping the preview window closed, append the string &1 to your link. If that doesn’t work, change it to &2. Keep incrementing until it does work. It should look something like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muK6gFtv7_o&1
And if that doesn’t work, increment:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muK6gFtv7_o&2

I’m editing my post and get the error

You will always run into the bug when you edit a post containing a YouTube link. Therefore you must always use the method of appending a string. Again, hide the preview window when you are done making the text edits. Then, either append the &1 or increment the number if you have already used the method.

I wrote my post already but didn’t know about these instructions yet, so I’m getting the error

Then it works the same as editing a post.

I didn’t hide the preview but it worked anyway

That will happen if you are quick and hit the post button before the YouTube preview was generated. You can get away with it if you’re fast, but it’s more reliable to just hide the preview. That will always work as long as you do it before you paste the link.

Why all this crap?

It’s a bug in the forum software. You can read some of the gory details here:

Have links to YouTube been disabled? Site Feedback

I’ve seen a few links to this thread from other threads, but the information is a bit scattershot, so I think it’s worth summarizing. The bug occurs because Discourse now sees a YouTube preview–that is, the inline video as compared to a bare link–as a “media item”. We don’t allow media items on this site for cost reasons, but in this case it’s a bug because the video is hosted elsewhere. And this is new behavior. Discourse takes a few seconds to convert a bare link into a preview. That is t…

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