Meta-Description cut after line-break?

phreak

Hi all,

I use a crawler to determine which discussion pages have good and bad meta-description length. The result showed me that many descriptions are too short and are basically the greeting term "Hello!" or "Hi!".

My guess is that Vanilla now adds the Meta-Description to the Database until a certain number of sole of the initial post... but it seem to cut this length by every line break.

Anyone who understands that logically the same?

hgtonight

The discussion pages uses the sliceParagraph function. This takes a string, a minimum length and returns a sentence that breaks on a paragraph. You can override this in your bootstrap: https://github.com/vanilla/vanilla/blob/d4c9bccedaa609f30c4df68bec44c6151e401feb/library/core/functions.general.php#L3333

You could instead increase the description max length by hooking into the discussion controller and resetting the description:

public function discussionController_render_before($sender) {
    $sender->description(sliceParagraph(Gdn_Format::plainText($sender->Discussion->Body, $sender->Discussion->Format), 350));
}

Adjust 350 to be something you like. 160 is the number used in the discussion controller normally.

phreak

Wow, thanx @hgtonight. I will dig into this.

Linc

see also https://github.com/vanilla/vanilla/pull/3484