Hyperlinking headings only works sometimes?

Hi there,

can anyone give me pointers or workarounds how to get heading-hyperlinks to work reliably?

I’m stretching all the wonderful things Discourse can do as a power forum user by creating a small database in a forum thread, in which I want to hyperlink each of a few 100 items on about 4 lists with a few others (health: causes, symptoms, treatments, alphabetical).
I’ve found I can theoretically do this using headings (1-6x#). Trouble is that only works sometimes for me, leads to all sorts of weird and wonderful effects no-one needs, and I can’t find a helpful pattern. And when I say sometimes, I mean an identical link may work once, then never again, without me having changed anything. Or it may mean of 8 identically formated links, 7 may sometimes work, 1 in between never does… :upside_down_face: The :fireworks: of technology or am I blind :see_no_evil: ?
I’ve varied the format in lots of ways I can think of, e.g. empty lines before or after or both, 3 different browsers… (The hyperlink I wanted to use in case you want to see what I’ve tried doesn’t reliably work for me, so you have to scroll down to 2021-06-11 and click on the details “how to hyperlink”.)

This is sposed to link to one of the headers and only sometimes does, it will hopefully take you to the post or at least thread, that varies too.

BTW these are some other hurdles and workarounds I've encountered

I’d’ve like to used the headings inside of the hiding of details too, but alas… I spose I’ll have to give that dream up.
Last hurdle I came across was 32000 characters being the maximum for a post, but hey, I can beat that. Edits ‘only’ being possible for a month I beat by making new posts and deleting old ones.
Very last hurdle was only being able to post 2 links in this post… :wink: :roll_eyes:

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Your links and heading ids must start heading-- which is in place to stop ‘griefing’, see: Deep Linking to Headings (Anchors)

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Thanks, nicely concise pointer…!
Many more extra characters are then necessary tho (30 per heading, 500 items = 15000), and only 32000 characters per post possible on that forum. Plus 9 for each link, which I haven’t even started on yet (I was dreaming of 2000 :rofl:). Simple #-headings’dve been better for that… :roll_eyes: I’ve asked my forum-admins if they could increase the max post length to 150000…. Any further suggestions/ideas on that? Have to rethink the whole linking-dream otherwise, I spose.
(I’m already deleting all thread titles & my tag out of link-URLs to save character-space.)
Reading around I found this interesting extra by @RobMeade: You can also use empty heading tags (but leaves extra “space”).

(For dummies like me: :one: My missing term was ‘anchor’… :two: ‘ids’ = IDs, had to look up :three: griefing here. (here: = abuse of styling))