Where does HipChat get images for inline URL preview?

[Dmitry Zotman]

Whenever someone post a link, (e.g. http://www.apple.com/) an inline preview is displayed, usually with the company logo for the website. However, when we post one of our company's URLs the the image that is displayed is one that we use for an error page and is not normally seen when the URL is accessed.

I'd like to know how HipChat chooses what image to use, so that we could adjust our code.

[sreuter]

@Dmitry Zotman Good question! There are multiple different parsers involved to retrieve the meta information that's being used to display a card. Everything from looking at the opengraph meta tags, site specific parsers that query the service API (like Twitter), towards falling back to generic html parsing.

To debug the issue with your specific site, you might wanna try the following urls to debug things:

http://open.iframe.ly/api/iframely?url=http://www.google.com&origin=yo

https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/

Is it possible your site is protected and you just happen to have an active session/cookie that allows you seeing the actual content when hitting it with your browser?