I’m glad to hear the website owner is happy with how the forum is looking / functioning! That’s good news.

Our ShareThis plugin allows the forum to work with the ShareThis service (Not SP). It’s therefore down to ShareThis to scan the page and take what they do from it. Unfortunately it seems as though text is the focus when it’s looking at a forum page, not pictures – We had this question the other day too!

Not sure if there’s anything you could do to get images included, although I’m no expert on SEO..

Ok, Maybe I’ll head over there and see what’s up.

Thanks!!

Meredith

please let us know what you find…  Its possible the share this folks have updated their api and now more can be done to ‘help’ with images…

one thing that might help…  assuming you are running 5.5.10, have you enabled the open graph tags stuff on forum – components – seo?  it might help a bit with images… at least with uploaded images…

Here’s what I got back from the developer…

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The reason no image is being pulled into the shares on Facebook, G+ or Pinterest is that there are no images specified on your forum page. I recommend explicitly setting an image in the Facebook Open Graph image (og:image) meta property on your page code.

For context: The ShareThis widget tries to identify images on the page to use on the social sharing services. It looks to see if either the og:image tag is specified in the head code of your page; if there is, it uses that. In your case it’s including the following blank file: https://s0.wp.com/i/blank.jpg *

We confirmed that that’s the file being included by running your URL through Facebook’s Object Debugger, found here: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/object/ You’ll see the above file name in the og:image section; when you open that URL, you’ll see it’s a blank image.

If you update the URL to something that includes an image you want, then that is the image that will be pulled when you or a user shares a post via the ShareThis buttons. To do this, you’ll want to add a tag that looks something like this between the head tags of your page code:

<meta property=”og:image” content=”http://sharethis.com/images/logo.jpg” />

To learn more about the Open Graph tags, feel free to check out our Help Center article here: http://support.sharethis.com/customer/portal/articles/475079-share-properties-and-sharing-custom-information#Open_Graph_Tags

Hope that helps! Please don’t hesitate to let us know if you have additional questions about this topic or another.

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* I believe this blank image came from jetpack publicize – I didn’t set this up so if there is an option to add a default image there, I suggest you do that or you’ll get a blank one.

In the meantime, I went into Yoast SEO plugin> social links and selected Twitter with large image.  I am testing to see if this solved the problem.  I also did add a featured image in Simple Press as recommended by another user here 🙂

Great support and feedback from them. 

Good luck – 

Meredith

…Or you can set a forum level ‘feature image’ that can also be used by Open Graph if no other image options exist (see the SP SEO admin panel help).

did you try the opengraph I recommend in post #4?

Yellow Swordfish said
…Or you can set a forum level ‘feature image’ that can also be used by Open Graph if no other image options exist (see the SP SEO admin panel help).

Yes, I did this and sized at your recommended 200x200px

Mr Papa said
did you try the opengraph I recommend in post #4?

Yes, I also did this first time around 🙂

Only the twitter is not showing images, the others are working

Must mean twitter does not support opengraph…  Used to be Facebook only but has grown…

Afraid I do not know how to make twitter pull image…

Oh well, watcha gonna do…

Does anyone have any other social media SP-friendly share software suggestions? Maybe something they are using? Or is working for them?…

If they do not use the Open Graph protocols do you know what they DO use? I am not a twitter fan so have nothing to do with it but if we know what they DO support then maybe we can work something out.