Thumbnails not displaying on Vimeo videos

mikey_vimeo · 2014-07-16T15:58:51.000Z

I work on the technical support team at Vimeo and we’ve noticed that thumbnails are no longer displaying for any Vimeo videos.

You can see a number of examples on our official Twitter page: https://twitter.com/vimeo

Any chance you could shed some light on this? Thanks!

jbulava · 2014-07-17T19:48:00.000Z

Hi Mikey, nothing obvious is jumping out so I’m inquiring with the engineering team. At first I thought it might be a robots.txt access issue, but some images are definitely showing up. (For reference: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/cards/troubleshooting#twitterbot)

mikey_vimeo · 2014-07-17T22:06:44.000Z

Thanks for checking it out, Jon!

KymbAkaBetty · 2014-07-18T01:04:23.000Z

How to stop emails from on Twitter Developers?

jbulava · 2014-07-18T13:35:34.000Z

No problem! To rule out the robots.txt issue, would it be possible to add Twitterbot to the file for access permission?

abiro · 2014-07-18T14:20:13.000Z

By turning off notifications in “My subscriptions” I guess.

mikey_vimeo · 2014-07-22T14:38:47.000Z

Yesterday afternoon we added Twitterbot and and also removed the character encoding from the content-type header. Doesn’t seem to have made any changes.

As you mentioned, thumbnails are showing up for some tweets – maybe it has something to do with the size of the player?

andy2343 · 2014-07-25T16:58:14.000Z

Hey Jon, any chance you’ve gotten a moment to take a look now that we’ve edited the robots.txt file? Thanks!

mikey_vimeo · 2014-07-31T18:13:52.000Z

Hoping for an update here. Any thoughts Jon?

mikey_vimeo · 2014-08-05T18:56:38.000Z

Any chance you’ve heard back from the engineering team about this yet Jon?

jbulava · 2014-08-06T14:59:00.000Z

Hi Andrew and Mikey, apologies again for missing these responses. I just responded to Andrew’s other discussion thread to send me a DM so we can set up a call to debug and resolve ASAP.

UNIT9 · 2015-03-02T13:10:19.850Z

@jbulava @mikey_vimeo

Hey guys, any idea on how to resolve this?
Our twitter looks awful without nice thumbnails

Many thanks

Geraint

jbulava · 2015-03-02T13:34:34.152Z

Hi @UNIT9, this issue was resolved back in August, but never closed out. Could you point me to a URL where you are experiencing an issue with Vimeo thumbnails?

UNIT9 · 2015-03-02T13:41:51.545Z

@jbulava On our twitter - @UNIT9

We are trying to post https://vimeo.com/119940766
But the thumbnail just comes up as black…

jbulava · 2015-03-02T14:52:54.336Z

I was underground and could not answer as quickly I’m seeing the same behavior, but I’m only seeing it for this specific video. Do you own this video? I’m curious to know if the thumbnail was updated after the upload. It’s possible that if the original thumbnail for the video was just a black screen that that is what we are caching on our side to render the card. I’m looking into this further and looping in the Cards engineering team, although they are in San Francisco so a response may be later today.

UNIT9 · 2015-03-02T14:57:29.733Z

@jbulava That’s great, thanks!

Yeah we own the video - the original thumbnail would have been
just a clip from the video had it have been changed - it would
never be just black. Let me know if they get back to you!
My direct email is geraint.smith@unit9.com

Thanks a lot!

G

jbulava · 2015-03-02T15:33:42.077Z

Ok, great. I’ll respond here with any updates.

jbulava · 2015-03-02T19:37:05.293Z

Hey Geraint, the engineering team confirmed that there was some kind of failure with our image fetcher when this specific Card was created. The Card for https://vimeo.com/119940766 should now render correctly. Please confirm when you get the chance!

UNIT9 · 2015-03-02T20:03:41.764Z

Hi mate, it works now thanks!

I need this one too https://vimeo.com/119845354

Would I have to do this every time??

jbulava · 2015-03-02T21:11:59.081Z

You shouldn’t. I’ll submit this to the team as well. They are trying to track down a pattern for Cards that have failed, so this will definitely help their cause.