On my forum, there are some topics built around various links. For some users, this thing is obvious, just paste the link to the topic title box, and the result works great, e.g.:
However, the problem is when users doens’t know/care about this feature, and paste the url into the composer, not into the title.
And hence is my question: me, as a moderator/admin, how can i switch a regular topic to an url topic?
Side quest: there is a way to automatically add a tag to topic-links or at least search only on these topics?
Thanks!
(i have no idea how this feature is called though)
At the moment I don’t think it is possible. @neil recently added the ability to remove an erroneously created “topic link”, so maybe that UI can be extended with an edit button at some point in the future.
Correct, there’s currently no way to go backwards from a topic to a link.
Is there a way we can make it more clear to your users that they could have pasted the link into the first field? The placeholder text says they can paste a link, so if they chose not to do that maybe they didn’t want the link.
I’m just running into an interesting challenge here - lots of people are replying to other posts with links to covid-19 resources, which we want to move into their own topics in a resources sub-category. When moving the posts and choosing the new topic, pasting the URL into the topic title does not work. It just looks like a URL in the new topic instead of getting the title from the page. It then needs to be edited to fix it, and does not have the nifty link in topic lists.
Is there a particular reason why it is not possible to add the link after the title has been written and the post saved? It comes up frequently in our community, usually when a moderator wants to add the link later to a topic posted by someone else.
I’m just glad we got the option to remove erroneous links, although there have definitely been occasions I would have wanted to add a link after a topic had been created.
I wonder if this is a result of ignorance rather than lack of desire. I’ve been using Discourse for some time (and even developed some plugins for it) but for some reason was unaware of this feature.
I do wonder if this really should have been a category level setting, something that forces people to always include a url in every new topic for a specific category.
That said, if we added something like this, we would be stuck with teaching people about the category setting so
I just discovered this functionality thanks to another topic asking about it. It is GREAT !
I tested a little to see how it works. It’s a bit complicated It seems you have to enter the URL first into the title. You can’t write anything else, and then want to add an URL (but you can enter the URL and then write something else, even before the URL). [EDIT: Only for a NEW post. You can’t edit an existing title]
The way you have to enter it is also a bit tricky: You have to write http:// or https://, and after that, write the complete URL without pausing for too long But you have to pause just after having written it (even adding a single space after, without having paused, will make that it doesn’t work).
The way I understand it is that http(s):// has to be detected at the very beginning of the title, and it will take what has been entered after it, as soon as there is a small pause (That’s it. This is the URL, and it can’t be changed afterwards. Not now. Not ever. It can only be removed later. If there is any space in what you entered, discourse won’t do anything and treat what you entered as a “classic” title. The link seems to be checked when validating the post: If there is no dot present, it will say it’s invalid. Copy/pasting works, with all he same parameters: You have to paste ONLY the URL; at the very beginning; no space. You can add what you want, AFTER that)
To remove it, you have to click the edit icon above, near the title. The edit function under the post don’t propose to remove the link.
So, as said, all this is a little tricky when you don’t know, but it’s still great.
I don’t really understand the question. Paste it from where ? If you want to copy/paste something, sure. But you also have all the times where you want to mention an URL you remember/know. Is your point to then type it somewhere else and copy/paste it ? What is the logic here ? (other than knowing that doing so solves a potential problem with discourse)
It seems you have to enter the URL first into the title. You can’t write anything else, and then want to add an URL (but you can enter the URL and then write something else, even before the URL). [EDIT: Only for a NEW post. You can’t edit an existing title]