The discussion addresses how to prevent links from displaying previews (oneboxes) on a Discourse forum. Beca_Lewis wants to share links without showing the site’s content, especially when users aren’t logged in. Jagster explains that using angle brackets < > around a URL prevents the preview. Canapin confirms that HTML links with target="_blank" can open in a new tab, though this may not work in all contexts. Loki suggests adding a space before the link to avoid previews, and Don recommends using the site setting blocked onebox domains to block previews for entire domains. The thread also notes that app-specific settings, like in the iOS DiscourseHub app, can control how links open.
Is there a way to put a link in a message or post and NOT have it show the page?
When I put a link to a page that is on my membership site, instead of displaying the link, it shows a message that the user is not logged in - which is confusing.
I’d like to post a link, but not have it show the website itself. And if it’s possible to make that link open into another tab that would be awesome too.
Am I understanding right — you don’t want this:
but this instead:
https://meta.discourse.org/t/use-google-search-by-default/249951
If so you get it for example using this instead of plain url: <https://meta.discourse.org/t/use-google-search-by-default/249951>
Yes! so I just put it in a bracket? Awesome! Do you have a solution for opening it in another tab too?
Internal links you can’t by default, I reckon.
You can try using ```<A href…> tag like this:
<a href="https://meta.discourse.org/t/use-google-search-by-default/249951" target="_blank">link text here</a>
I don’t know if it works but it is easy ti try out 
edit: did not work here
External ones follow admin-setting default other external links in new tab.
Thanks, I was wondering if regular html links with the target blank would work … I appreciate the help. If not… it’s not a big deal!
Your link has the target="_blank" attribute in your message and opens in a new tab when left clicking on it, so it works, unless I’m misunderstanding something?
On a side note, if I quote your message, it will transform your link as a standard markdown link and trim the target attribute, removing the new tab opening inside the quote.
edit: oh, you edited your message so mine does make little sense now. But still, a manual link with target="_blank" works, and it’s worth noting that there’s also a per-user setting for external links only:
https://meta.discourse.org/my/preferences/interface
No you aren’t. But open in the new tab didn’t work at the Hub and I was too lazy to check it on Safari. But when I did right click, aka. long press, from that open command opened to browser as expected. Apple has its own solutions everywhere
I added closing </a> but it was shortly after I published that answer (and I would like to put thinking emoji here but emojies aren’t here; strange).
Thank you for the help!
That’s true. And yet external links are opened at Safari, even that is disabled. Anything else would be strange.
If you put a space before the link (or any other characters), Discourse will not draw the preview:
How to stop links from showing the site
This applies to internal and external links.
Without the space:
Thank you! I also found that putting the link between < and > works..
Yes it does. I just mentioned the leading space because it’s a bit quicker to type… just space, paste, and go. 
Hello,
Just another tip for external links 
You can also block the onebox by domain. This is a good solution if you want to block it for the whole domain.
There is a site setting: blocked onebox domains where you can add those domains for which you don’t want the onebox to generate.
For example: I added wikipedia.org to it.
So it won’t generate onebox for Wikipedia links.
