I’ve been doing some big updates to a site recently and have discovered the following…
If you turn off Stacks metadata getting added to the source code in Stacks prefs. You need to delete everything on the server and fully republish for the change to take.
If you want as complete open graph info as poss you need to add a title to the built-in RW site title bit in settings, even if you are not using it, as regardless of it being used or not OG pulls it in. If you don’t change it, it will remain at “My Website”.
You just need to mark a page as changed. This will cause the new version of the page (with/without the meta data) to overwrite the old one.
We could mark every page as needing update after this change, but it seemed like that might not be what the user was really after – often they just want the settings to affect their current page – and not to have to republish the entire site.
In any case, if you DO WANT THAT (to have the new meta-data setting affect the entire site) then just choose Mark All Pages as Changed from the file menu and republish.
Didn’t work. Tried marking pages as changed, published, republished all pages, to my surprise it was all still there. Cleared cache etc. No joy. Only thing that worked was deleting all files and republishing.
The stacks metadata was appearing in the Facebook debuger and the source code until I deleted and republished.
Should add, I actually turned the meta data off months ago on this project, and assumed it was gone, after many complete republishes. It wasn’t until I updated the OG data that I noticed it was still there. So, it’s not like I only turned it off today and it was still there, which I’m guessing could be down to caching.
You are of course the expert, but I can only report what I saw.
This is odd, and perhaps the problem here is that I don’t actually understand what the stacks meta-tags are! I thought it was the long list of stacks used on the page that sits near the top of the page cource code, but perhaps it’s not.
This page: https://www.mailshotmonkey.co.uk/ has the add meta-tags ticked, see screenshot, I’ve never touched the setting on this site, but looking that the source the list mentioned above doesn’t appear to be there.
Perhaps @isaiah you can shed some light on this, or explain where I’m going wrong?
I took a look at the page you mentioned and it seems to have loads of Stacks-specific meta tags. So… I think whatever it is that you’re looking for, is something different.
I’ve also double checked in both Stacks 3.6.6 and Stacks 4.0.0 beta 27 and both appear to have no difficulty in publishing the meta tags. It behaves like I mentioned above.
I suspect this just comes down to a misunderstanding about what Stacks meta tags are.
BTW: there is absolutely no reason to ever publish these on a production site – or well, no reason that i can think of – people surprise me with exotic use-cases all the time, so nothing should surprise me now. 😝
these exist for the sole benefit of aiding in debugging with stack developers since it publishes the name, ID, and version of every stack on the page as well as for Stacks itself. i doubt those details affect your search rank. 😋
EDIT: I think I know what’s been happening: Over the weekend I’ve been rebuilding a site, so have had lots of Chrome preview windows open, in various states of meta-tags added and not added. I think I’ve been getting confused by what was the preview window and live when when checking the source.
That’s the only conclusion I can come up with. Nothing else seems plausible.
