Microsoft Outlook Link Preview Feature - creates erroneous Current Issue URL preview

FYI: Microsoft Outlook’s Link Preview feature relies on cached information from Bing, which can appear as an error to recipients of OJS notifications that include the Current Issue URL /issue/current – most frequently, as a part of the New Issue Notification.

If the email recipient’s Link Preview feature is turned on, whenever Outlook detects a URL in an email message, it will automatically provide a little “preview” box. However, instead of fetching a live version of the website to display in the “preview” box, Outlook is using a cached version, from the last time Bing crawled the site.

The preview is almost always an out-dated version of the Current Issue URL, displaying metadata from a past issue. Even if Bing crawls the journal site very frequently, it is very unlikely that the /issue/current URL will update quickly enough.

I’m not sure if this is within scope for PKP, but it might be helpful for journal managers & hosting folks to know, in case anyone else receives these reports from end-users.

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Hi @ezheng,

Thanks very much for sharing this! I’m not sure if there is much we will be able to do with this on our end, but I will bring it to the attention of our dev team, and this is good to know that this issue might crop up.

-Roger
PKP Team

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