s9e Media Sites 2.16.8

Updated:

• Facebook: minor style change. A white background has been added to fix the issue with Facebook's transparent/unreadable posts on dark styles.
• IMDb: it looks like they might be phasing out their embedded player. It's still working for now.
• Podbean: misc updated to keep up with their markup.
• Misc coding changes in the lazy loader. No functional change intended nor expected.

Removed:

• NBC Sports: their video section is dead.
• Stitcher: they were acquired by Pandora in 2020, which shut down the Stitcher app and website a couple of months ago.

Fixed a bug introduced in 2.12.6 that prevents embeds from loading if the theme does not have a sticky header. If you have installed 2.12.6 and one of your theme does not have a sticky header, you'll want to upgrade to this version.

This update contains small modifications to the lazy loader that shouldn't have any noticeable effect. You can keep reading if you're interested in the details.

This update makes use of contemporary JavaScript features to replace boilerplate code with native JavaScript features such as destructuring assignment and the spread syntax. It also adds some small efficiency improvements related to dynamically-sized embeds such as tweets. I do not expect those changes to be noticeable or produce undesirable side effects.

An upcoming update will feature some more fundamental changes intended to improve the experience of the most observant users as well as users with slow connections (e.g. mobile.) That upcoming update will have a greater potential to introduce unintended side-effects, and if that's the case it will be easier to diagnose them separately.

Facebook is being wishy-washy about reels so it's possible they won't work at times. Probably growing pains that'll disappear once the product matures.

This is a minor improvement to the lazy loader that only concerns dynamically-sized embeds such as tweets or Reddit posts.

The way dynamically-sized embeds work is that the content provider loads the embedded content then notifies the host page of the size it should be displayed as. This add-on usually acts as a middleman and caches this value for later viewings to reduce/eliminate Cumulative Layout Shift. Some content providers (most notably, 𝕏) are too eager to declare the size of their content, before their own images are fully loaded. This leads the add-on's lazy loader to create a placeholder of the correct size for the embedded content (e.g. tweet), then shrink it as the content provider incorrectly notifies that its content is smaller than expected, only to grow it back to the correct size once all content has loaded.

In this update, the lazy loader has been changed to provide a grace period before shrinking an embed. They still grow as soon as a new size has been determined, but they'll wait a little bit (5 seconds currently) before they shrink.

• You can now share Reddit URLs while being tracked. 🕵
• Praise Spez.
• (actually the tracking ID gets lost in the shuffle when the URL is resolved so it'll act like a regular URL)

This adds support for the new spotify.link short links as well as internationalized URLs.

An option has been added to select how scraping is performed; It has four options: auto (default), native cURL calls, XenForo's client (Guzzle), or disabled. The default value is fine for the overwhelming majority of users so you don't have to care about it unless you use a special configuration for your network, in which case you should select the default XenForo client. Disabling scraping may prevent some content from being embedded.

The current default is to use native cURL calls because XenForo's client (Guzzle) does not seem support HTTP/2 at the moment. Future versions will eventually switch to use Guzzle, and the option will be removed.

In addition, defunct site Gfycat has been removed from the add-on and Facebook has been updated to support more video URLs.

An option has been added that will display a link to the original URL used to embed content. This is only available when the add-on is configured to use a BBCode instead of the [MEDIA] BBCo...plies to content embedded via a [URL] BBCode.

The rules for determining whether a Facebook URL can be embedded have been tightened. This should lead to fewer false positives.
Support for x.com URLs has been added.