Prerendering: Snapchat support

Hi,

I am setting up Snapchat’s Creative Kit for Web, which allows sharing web pages to Snapchat.

They seem to be crawling for Open Graph tags with the following UA: Snapchat Creative Kit Web Share Google-HTTP-Java-Client/1.32.1 (gzip)

Is there an updated list of user-agents that will trigger prerendering? Is this list going to evolve?

Thanks!

We can update the list of user agents that receive prerendering, if we become aware that new widely-used services require prerendering (since updates affect all customers, we only do it for services in wide use). Do you have any docs to link to that this is a necessary feature for snapchat sharing? This is the first request and I’m surprised that nobody else has requested it if it is necessary…

Sharing from the web (instead of from a native app) was announced on October 24th, so that’s quite new. Here is a link to the doc: https://docs.snapchat.com/docs/api/web/

The tags are used to generate a preview when sharing the page (screenshot below) and to add a custom sticker on the user’s story.

ah, that makes more sense then :slight_smile:

Do you find any documentation on their user-agent? We’d like to target what they document rather than what seems to be true since they are more likely to preserve that for the foreseeable future :slight_smile:

Hi! I just got a reply from Snapchat developer support with the following info:

The user agent may evolve but will have always have the prefix: Snapchat Creative Kit Web Share

Is this good for you?

Yup, that should suffice. We’ll try to get the change in place in the next couple of weeks and follow up here once we do.

@apuyou, we made the update but I’m concern that the change made won’t actually work for the Web Snap Kit SDK, only for the Snapchat crawler bot.

Would you be willing to test one of your Netlify sites this library now and let us know if it works or not?

My concerns is that I targeted their default User-Agent strings which look like this:

Snapchat/10.30.1.1 (iPhone8,1; iOS 11.2.5; gzip)

So, our prerender service is looking for “Snapchat/” not just plain “Snapchat”. :frowning:

This means if the SDK’s User-Agent is actually something like “Snapchat Creative Kit Web Share”, it won’t trigger our prerendering.

If prerendering doesn’t work when you test a Netlify site now, please let us know and I’ll remove the “/” so both User-Agent’s will trigger our prerendering.

Sorry about the confusion on my part. If another update is needed please let us know, I’ll hopefully be able have it completed by Monday.

Thank you for this @luke and sorry for the delay in getting back to you.

The User Agent you are mentioning is used by the Snapchat in-app web view. This is not what we are trying to target, and should not be pre-rendered as it corresponds to end-users visiting the site using a browser with JS support.

Pre-rendering should be done for the Snapchat bot that crawls web pages to generate the preview I have attached earlier. This bot uses the following User Agent:

Snapchat Creative Kit Web Share Google-HTTP-Java-Client/1.32.1 (gzip)

In the end, the pre-render service should be looking for a UA starting with Snapchat Creative Kit Web Share and not Snapchat/.

Hi, @apuyou, the prerender User-Agent trigger has been updated once more. Will you please test it again now?

Hi @luke! I can confirm that pre-rendering now works when sharing to Snapchat from web. Thank you! This resolves my issue :slight_smile:

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