The error is occurring for a website that may be blocked in the country of hosting the forum. However, this legal situation should not prevent a topic from being created given that other jurisdictions (e.g., the reader’s jurisdiction) might not block the same website. Personally, I think this is a #bug to prevent creating a topic or posting about a censored URL. It’s not Discourse’s decision to make whether to link to a website or not, but the authorities of the viewer’s jurisdiction. FYI, the link I’m trying to link is a report from TorrentFreak.com about a study ordered by the EU parliament regarding AI and copyright. There’s nothing illegal there: it’s just that Germany seems to have banned TorrentFreak.com, otherwise a very good source of information about Internet censorship. So my question is: how to bypass Discourse’s code that really should be a warning, and not a block?

An error occurred: Featured Link is invalid

hellekin December 9, 2025, 1:06pm 2

Actually, making the new topic a shared draft and then publishing the draft works around this issue.

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