In a support discussion titled ‘External links allowed as Tags?’, Mariane reported an unusual case where an external Wikipedia link appeared as if it were a tag, specifically pointing to ‘Death_by_coconut’. The link wasn’t part of the conversation content, and the team couldn’t reproduce the behavior. simon clarified that what was seen was not a tag but a ‘topic featured link’, which can be triggered by pasting a URL into the topic title field — provided the site setting ‘topic featured link enabled’ is active. He suggested the user may have pasted the link initially and later edited the title to remove it, possibly within the first few minutes of posting. Mariane confirmed no edit history was visible beyond her own edits and agreed with simon’s explanation. The team removed the link due to potential spam risk, and the issue was resolved with clarification that this behavior is a known feature, not a bug or exploit. The discussion highlights the importance of understanding how featured links work to avoid confusion and potential misuse.
Hi,
Not sure if it is a troll or not…We have found an external link set as a ‘‘Tag’’. We are not sure how the user managed to do this or if he even did it intentionally.
It leads to a specific page of Wikipedia (Death_by_coconut), not the homepage. We are unable to recreate the result you see in the screenshot. It’s like a website was added as a tag, but there is literally no ‘‘Wikipedia’’ link in the entire conversation.
Would you know anything about that? We removed it but we think that it is kind of an open door for SPAM.
What you were seeing was a topic featured link, not a tag. I can reproduce it by pasting the link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_by_coconut into the composer’s title input on my site. For it to work, the topic featured link enabled site setting needs to be enabled.
Possibly the user created the topic by pasting the link into the title input, and then edited the topic to update its title and remove the Wikipedia onebox. Can you see any edit history for the topic?
The only edits visible are the ones I did.
I suppose it is like you said; the user might have pasted it at first and then edited it before publishing in or right after in the first minutes it was live.
