Embedding, but don't automatically create a topic until a user chooses to comment

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

@Heather_Miller

(For the record, this behavior seems to us like more of a bug than a feature.)

Its certainly buggy under your use case.

I am open to changing this so the comment link goes to an interstitial webpage, which would initiate the crawlback if needed and then take you to the topic.

So:

• User clicks “http://discourse.mysite.com/comments?url=https://mainsite.com&user-click=true” : note user-click=true must be appended via JavaScript to avoid crawlers creating topic.

• If the Discourse topic already exists, discourse redirects to it.

• If the Discourse topic does not exist (and user-click is true), initiate crawlback, if successful and topic is created, redirect to it.

There would be a possible few second delay on “show comments” click (we could display a glorious hamster on a treadmill creating the topic or something along those lines when stuff is held up), JavaScript crawlers could mess stuff up (though they are quite rare and the /comments path or whatever should be excluded in robots.txt)

@eviltrout

I think this could work within our constraints, but would be at least a day or two of work for us. I unfortunately can’t see us prioritizing this any time soon as the typical use case is fine for most people who don’t have millions of articles.

I agree, as a team we just can’t prioritize this at the moment, there is about 1-2 days work in nutting out the change I proposed bit I think my “mini” spec is sound (@eviltrout ? )

I am putting pr-welcome on this in case the community feels like contributing.

I also am not sure we need a “switch” for this mode, it should just be the default behavior, it is far safer. (maybe if people need to know for sure the topic exists on discourse they could turn off the new behavior)