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 B…

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.

Topic		Replies	Views
Ability to Block Discourse Access from Geographic Regions or Countries Feature	19	1728	June 16, 2025
Adding a featured link to your topic Using Discourse featured-link , how-to	0	681	July 18, 2024
Only allow link sharing? Support	7	900	December 14, 2022
Editing a topic link does not change its featured_link Bug	3	729	July 24, 2019
`Topic#featured_link` containing more than just a valid URL Bug	5	817	December 4, 2017