Copying a link includes the click count

[yanokwa (Yaw Anokwa)]

Sometimes I have text with a URL that folks have clicked on, say 9 times.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet https://example.com/NQoiffrCbcaZHcKQe5syENZiKWsvEc onsetetur sadipscing elitr.

Someone copies that text and pastes it into another post. They don’t notice the 9 at the end. So we now have a link that looks valid, but isn’t.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet https://example.com/NQoiffrCbcaZHcKQe5syENZiKWsvEc9 onsetetur sadipscing elitr.

This happens because we have a group of people who take turns writing community announcements that always have a link to a running Google Doc. Person B copies the previous announcement from Person A and then yeah, broken links everywhere. Could there be a space added before the click count?

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

I believe that’d be a markup issue @awesomerobot I do like the suggestion if we can do it easily, have seen this before.

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

It’s possible we could have a space here inserted, but even copying the number is superfluous imo, it should be in <span class='ignore-copy'> or something like that and we should get it into the clipboard without the number.

Also @yanokwa do you have enable rich text paste enabled, does this resolve your issue?

@vinothkannans we got to spend some time improving internal usage of enable rich text paste, it is a bit flakey.

[awesomerobot (Kris)]

There’s a way to do prevent copying using psuedo elements, but it’s not great for accessibility (“CSS generated content is not content”)

Prevent an element from being selected and copied with CSS

Adding a space is a small improvement that shouldn’t impact anything else though.

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

@awesomerobot

a small improvement that shouldn’t impact anything else though.

This is always to my s

[yanokwa (Yaw Anokwa)]

@sam

Also @yanokwa do you have enable rich text paste enabled, does this resolve your issue?

I do not rich text paste enabled and when I tried, it did not resolve the issue.

[awesomerobot (Kris)]

PR to add a space before the counter here:

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/5698

[awesomerobot (Kris)]

Space is added, so now you can copy & paste without breaking the link… like so:

https://example.com/NQoiffrCbcaZHcKQe5syENZiKWsvEc 2

Still room for future improvement, like not allowing click counts into the clipboard at all.

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

Confirmed looks good, results in:

dolor sit amet https://example.com/NQoiffrCbcaZHcKQe5syENZiKWsvEc 2 onsetetur

Great idea @yanokwa