Better URLs and lesson metadata

[Mierdin]

Popping links directly to lessons is a bit of a fail right now. For instance, in slack, no description is shown, no images, and the URL with the variables (instead of pretty paths) looks bad.

The latter is easy to fix. The former, less so, since it's a single page application. Might want to look into how others do it.

[Astlor]

1. Have the application generate “social media landing/metadata pages”. These pages are the “publicly visible/indexable” bits that contain little more than a title image, brief description, flavicon, and a bunch of metadata. These pages contain an autoredirect (often on a 2 or 5 second timer, to avoid redirect autofollow from bots) that carries the user through from the landing page to the specific URL (or result of a form submission, depending on how you build your redirects) that you ultimately want them landing on.

2. Post links using the landing page URL, not the actual final URL. In practice, this required creating a button that says something like “click here to get sharable link for this course”. This required a brief bit of training, but had the benefit that there was a good use case to train staff to use the button for sharing, because it avoided errors due to single-sign-on issues. (Outsiders landing on the publicly visible, but limited landing pages wouldn’t be redirected if they weren’t signed in via SSO, etc.)

3. Make sure that the autoposting system and all bots are aware of the landing page/real URL dichotomy, and use the landing page URLs.

I know it’s hacky AF, but it worked for me in similar situations.