If you’re sharing a link to the Hello Club portal or one of your upcoming events on social media, you will notice that the social media platform will often generate a share preview/snapshot of the page you are sharing.

If all goes well, this preview will include your organisation name as well as the event name, and the event banner or your custom club background:

This process is fully automatic and there is generally nothing you need to do to make this appear. However, if you find that your previews are not generated correctly, please have a read through the following sections to find out possible reasons and troubleshooting steps.

Whenever you share a link on a social media platform, that platform will send a bot or crawler to visit that link and obtain the underlying page contents. It then analyses those contents, and grabs specific pieces of information like title, description, preview image etc. It then uses this information to put together the preview that you see when you share a link.

This works great for websites which have static pages with fixed content, as it’s easy for the crawler to obtain all the info it needs just by reading the raw page contents.

Hello Club however is a dynamic web app, and it generates its page contents with data that is read from our servers dynamically. This means the there’s an extra step for the bot or crawler to take before they can identify the correct information.

Most crawlers however don’t actually run any code on a web page they visit, but rather only look at the initial page contents. This means they only "see" the default information that we present on the page, and not the dynamic content that pertains to your specific organisation or event.

To overcome this problem, our hosting service creates pre-rendered pages which already include the dynamic content, and serves these pages whenever it detects that a social media platform crawler is trying to fetch that page.

This leads to most crawlers being able to obtain the dynamic information when they visit our page, and render correct reviews.

There could be a few reasons why a preview is not displaying correctly, but the most common reason is when an unknown crawler visits the page and it is served the "normal" page contents rather than the pre-rendered page contents designed for crawlers specifically.

This could happen when you share a link via an unknown social media platform, or via direct text message on your phone.

Unfortunately the list of known crawlers is not maintained by Hello Club, so we have no control over this particular problem.

In some rare cases it could also be that a certificate problem or other issue on our end is causing incorrect previews to render. However, you can verify if that's the case by checking the link you’re sharing with the following online tool:

Social Share Preview

Just enter the link you want to check and verify how the preview would show up on various social media platforms.

If it looks ok on the preview, everything is most likely working as expected on our end and we recommend trying to share the link via another platform to ensure the preview shows up correctly.

If the preview doesn't look good either, please contact us and we’ll try to investigate further.