Broken media tags apparently just don't show up as anything.

[Pocket]

Example: This recent post from P&R.

The URL appeared for like half a second for me (it was a tweet, in case you didn't see it) and then it just disappeared leaving empty space instead of a box with some kind of 404 error inside like I've come to expect from most forums. With no obvious indication that there's supposed to be something there, posts with broken embeds could be very confusing.

EDIT: Oh ho, the plot thickens. When I follow that particular link to the exact post, I actually do get a broken embed box, albeit a really ugly one, but when I just load the page by its page number, it does what I described.

 

[CoffeeHorse]

I haven't been able to duplicate this yet. I just see the URLs. They never disappear for me.

We'll look into it.

 

[Kalidor]

It probably just suppresses any broken links so it doesn't look ugly. But the tweet it was originally linked to is indeed non-existent.

 

[Pocket]

Yeah, it looks like this is going to be a problem on P&R in particular. People keep making bad tweets and then deleting them, leaving the person who embedded them looking like a crazy person talking to themselves.

I've noticed that working Twitter embeds take a while to load in, which suggests that Xenforo is using JavaScript to replace the BBcode with the embed on the fly, and is specifically waiting to retrieve the tweet's contents from Twitter rather than just plug the URL into the standard HTML for an iframe embed. And that there's no fallback if it gets a 404 response or a timeout. I'm now curious if this also does the same thing with other sites. Let's find out!

Between the last paragraph and this one is a MEDIA tag for a correctly-formatted (11 letters) but nonexistent YouTube video ID. It will either be blank space or a broken embed; I'm guessing the former.

EDIT: OK, for me it's showing up as a "This video is unavailable." Even after I reload the page. So it might be specific to Twitter embeds, or it might also be specific to displaying a particular page of a thread and not be happening because this is page 1 of 1.

 

[Pocket]

Also I went back to my link in OP to check what the "correct" broken embed looks like, and the interesting thing is that Teufel's post now displays exactly how I originally saw it, with empty space where the tweet should be, but the post immediately after it, which also had an embedded tweet that I guess is also gone now, shows the raw URL with a Twitter icon next to it. I don't think either of those was what I was seeing before, but I've already forgotten. Maybe it's different because Teufel's post also contained other text?