In a discussion titled ‘Backlinks make certain posts more popular than they should be!’, users explore how internal links (backlinks) on Discourse can unintentionally inflate the popularity of unrelated topics—particularly problematic in high-traffic posts like the welcome topic on meta.discourse.org. gassim raises concerns about manually removing links and proposes features like pinning or sorting backlinks. Moin suggests using ?silent=true in URLs to suppress backlinks and notifications without altering the original post—gassim and Heliosurge confirm this is helpful and previously unknown to them. NateDhaliwal confirms that backlinks are currently sorted only by popularity, making pinning or custom sorting a feature request—gassim later creates a dedicated topic for this. tobiaseigen adds real-world context, noting they’ve been manually cleaning up links from the welcome topic to avoid confusing new users, and moved documentation on ?silent=true to the community wiki for broader accessibility. The consensus is that ?silent=true is a practical workaround, while sorting/pinning remains a desired future enhancement.
This could end up more of a feature request, but here’s the explanation. For instance, in the most popular topic on Discourse Welcome to meta.discourse.org, you can see there are ‘backlinks’ (if this is the accurate word) that became very popular,
However, most of these topics might not necessarily be related. If the discourse team want to clear that list, they’d have to manually go to each topic they don’t want and delete the reference.
Thoughts about this:
What if we want to sort that list? For instance, I want specific posts to appear at the top of this list in a particular topic. (maybe an option to ‘pin’ a post backlink?
If I want to remove a topic from that list, I have to go and edit that manually by removing the reference, but what if I don’t want to edit the other topic (since it might actually be important to mention it there) yet I don’t need it to be ‘so popular’ because it referenced the top topic…
You know, that’s a very helpful suggestion! I had to use ``` to keep the links in the new topics but not get them to be referenced in the top topic, so I’ll actually go back and update that. Thanks!
So for the ‘sorting’ the list and pinning certain ones to the top, it’s probably a feature request, right?
Very nice. Was not aware of this. Should probably work in a link resource if some sort. I have used swapping username in a link to credit another user with a link.
Funny, for the case of the welcome topic here I have been working through the incoming links to remove them. It’s not just that the welcome topic is more popular than it should be but those links are going to be very confusing and technical sounding to new members here just as they are finding their feet in the community.
Moin helpfully reminded me about the ability to append ?silent=true to the links to suppress those related links, which I am now doing.
