YouTube Playlists on Forums

Hello!

YouTube playlists used to be embedded and any Trust Level could post them. Now, my old playlists in this post no longer work and say “Video Unavailable” when clicked. Posting single videos still works. Has something changed with Trust Levels, have YouTube playlists broken, or are they no longer allowed to be posted/embedded?

Thank you!

EDIT: I found a workaround. This is the original broken format: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5TaicIPlcNPwnl7Fmb_JhDEFQH_vZfuS

This is the workaround formatting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzUB-9ElhVk&list=PL5TaicIPlcNPwnl7Fmb_JhDEFQH_vZfuS

Within YouTube, click on the first video in the playlist you want and hit the “Share” button on that video, then copy link and paste. It will look like this: https://youtu.be/GzUB-9ElhVk

Now add your equivalent of GzUB-9ElhVk to after https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=, add &list=, then add the last line from your original playlist to that, in this case, PL5TaicIPlcNPwnl7Fmb_JhDEFQH_vZfuS.

I don’t know how “used to” you’re thinking, but Discourse (the forum engine Blizzard is using) embeds Youtube links in a fashion which is incompatible with the YouTube playlist.

This isn’t something Blizzard can fix, and if you read to the end of the Discourse discussion you’ll see it’s not something Discourse is actively planning on fixing either.

That is odd. The playlists worked a couple days ago, and had been ever since the new forums were released November 2018.

It may not be just that, of course. That Discourse bug report discussion seems more focused on thumbnailing/preview box, but the issue could also break using the playlist link too.

The example in that Discourse thread behaves the same as the embedded playlists in your example post, so this definitely looks like the cause, no matter the timing. At least, as far as I can tell from a fairly shallow analysis.

Seems like an odd design choice to break something useful like a playlist URL, but IMHO Discourse is kind of famous for idiosyncratic design decisions.

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I definitely agree. I have learned a lot over the course of using Discourse on here, encountering interesting features and have made a few posts about changes, code discoveries, and bugs.

I did some digging into the link you posted and found a workaround which I added to the main post. Typically I look on Discourse but I totally forgot about it. Thank you so much for your post and the helpful information!

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Outstanding! I’m glad this isn’t entirely dead-end broke, but I still hope Discourse and Blizzard work out a more desirable and consistent fix. I really don’t see a good reason to discriminate among different types of YouTube web objects. This should be fixable.

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