HTTP 403 responses on shortened links

rdelrossi

I'm a little over my skis here. I've created a custom link shortener app based on Brett Terpstra's Shortly open source project at https://github.com/ttscoff/shortly. It works great, except on Threads. Links there show up there but as sort of blank boxes that, frankly, I wouldn't click on. Over on Bluesky or Twitter the links look great, complete with previews.

I've tried to diagnose this myself with the help of some AI, but no go. Was hoping you might be able to point me a better direction. The AI said I should ask, "Requests to my domain (rsnstats.link) from Meta's link preview crawlers (facebookexternalhit and Meta-ExternalAgent) are receiving an HTTP 403 Forbidden response at the Nginx edge proxy before reaching my PHP application on opal8. Could you please check if Meta's crawler User-Agents or AS32934 IP ranges are getting blocked by a global proxy filter and allowlist them for my domain?"

Appreciate any guidance, thank you!

-- Robert

sean

rdelrossi The user agents are not blocked on your site. We do occasionally block Meta-ExternalAgent IPs to prevent abusive crawling but they don't appear to be blocked on opal8 at this time. I've reset the firewall anyway as a precaution.

If the issue persist then please email the support team for further assistance.

rdelrossi

sean Thanks, Sean.