Financial Times - Twitter Card changes won't show up despite following cache-busting steps. Why?

[ft_snappy]

Hi, I’ve just added additional card metadata tags to the FT Video pages.
These add a large display image in twitter:image, a twitter:card:stream property and twitter:card:stream:content_type.

You can see an example page here:

These changes aren’t showing up when the links are tweeted, because the cache is retained for roughly a week, as documented.

However, if you follow the steps to bust the cache, as given here:
https://dev.twitter.com/docs/cards/troubleshooting#caching
They don’t work. I’ve tweeted the page url, then shortened it on bit.ly, then tweeted that shortened url, and refreshed the browser at each step.
But the twitter card still shows up with a small image, and the stream and content type still aren’t picked up by the validator.

Why is this? Do these steps no longer work?

[andypiper]

That has always been a somewhat hacky solution to tricking the cards cache into thinking you’re posting a new URL, so it isn’t a totally watertight solution. I believe the steps “should” work but it can be a bit hit-and-miss, sorry if this is not resolving your issue.

In particular you mention that the validator is not picking up the stream information, and I’m seeing the same thing - that’s weird. Is there any chance that a CDN or content proxy in front of your site is presenting something different based on geography? I can’t quite figure out why the validator (which should be hitting a fresh copy of your site each time, regardless of what is rendered in a tweet with a link later) is missing those metadata tags, which I can see in the source.

[ft_snappy]

Hi Andy,

Apologies for the slow response on this, I didn’t get notified when you’d replied.

Yes, you were completely right. We ended up discovering that our US data centre had a different version of the application running, which meant the US-based Twitter Card bot was being served different content to UK users.

Thanks for your help Andy!