Home page featured video should actually embed the video on the page

[rbbeeston]

currently the home page featured video looks like this:

should look more like this:

[sdarwin]

@rbbeeston previously we had been embedding videos. It led to some controversy in the boost community since videos use cookies and/or require a GDPR popup asking about permission. That is also why we removed Google Analytics and switched to Plausible analytics.

[vinniefalco]

Logged-in users should have the option to show embedded videos. Alternatively, we could give unregistered users a way to opt-out, by storing a permanent cookie on their computer (is that possible?)

[sdarwin]

The idea at the time was to avoid those GDPR popups and cookie permissions by not using third-party cookies.

Now, you are saying that you want to return to that? How about Google Analytics? Either way, then the cookie permissions stuff must be implemented.

[vinniefalco]

I am just complaining, without offering solutions or suggesting change.

[rbbeeston]

Was discussed during the weekly meeting, due to the amount of other coding to deal with GDPR issues, it's added to the backlog for now. Another alternative would be to add a thumbnail in lieu of the embedded video, but it's on hold until after more pressing issues are completed.

[rbbeeston]

I did a bit of research on this, I don't know if it's enough, but youtube has a "Privacy Enhanced Mode" for embedding links. However, there would be data stored if the video is actually played.

[vinniefalco]

try a thumbnail generation service

[rbbeeston]

looks like we should be able to pull it using https://i.ytimg.com/vi/<videoID>/hqdefault.jpg

[vinniefalco]

Right, and to be clear we need our backend to make the request for the thumbnail and cache it ourselves. Otherwise, ytimg.com will be tracking user IPs. We can generate the thumbnail at the time the news is posted. And we will need a Python script to add them for the already-existing news.