Bookmarklet or chrome extension for posting links to a Discourse

feature
1

Making it easier to post a link (with a required comment) would be a nice way to stimulate conversation especially in small/early Discourse forums.

Has anyone looked into making a chrome extension or bookmarklet to make it easy to post a link into Discourse?

If not, would anyone else want this?

4 Likes
2

Why is it difficult to post a link in Discourse?

3

Here’s the workflow for a bookmarklet:

  1. see an article you like
  2. click a button
  3. takes you to the forum with the link prepopulated
  4. type in a message, click post

versus:

  1. see an article you like
  2. make a new tab
  3. go to the forum
  4. click new post
  5. switch back to the old tab
  6. copy the url
  7. switch back to the forum tab
  8. paste into the forum
  9. click post

It’s more than 2x the number of steps, and for a casual user, it’s too much work. I think it would be a meaningful way to add new content into a forum, especially for a small/new community.

4

You can become 22% more efficient by copying the URL before leaving the original page, if that helps.

5 Likes
5

We found at Stack Exchange that users definitely know how to copy and paste links in their browser, and often prefer that to manual “share” buttons.

The data 100% supported this hypothesis, every time we looked.

(Possible it might be a bit different in mobile, where “tap and hold” is required to copy links.)

6

Jeff,
not arguing that people don’t know how to do it, just saying it’s a lot more convenient to do it. This is why tweet buttons exist, Buffer, plus extensions for pinning to Pinterest, etc. All about making it easy.

I’m guessing this is possible but again, requires a plugin?

7

This should not require a plugin, I would be happy to have a feature that allows you to do something like

http://sitename.com/new-topic?title=some+title&body=some+body&category=come+category

At the moment though it is not yet supported.

6 Likes
8

Yes, that would be great. That would make it simple to build “Post to discourse” or bookmarklets and the link.

9

Yes there are a few other topics here requesting that already.

10

Yep - part of my post for being able to click a link and have the body and title filled out. That would be perfect.

11

Hi Sam,
any update on getting this URL? It sounds like it’s getting requested by a few folks, and it would be great to have.

12

Sure, I like this idea @techapj can you add it to your list?

3 Likes
13

Any update from @techapj?

14

I tried to get this feature in last week, but it’s more work than expected. Will get it done this week.

15

Just sent a PR for this feature :turtle:

See:

5 Likes