Just to be clear, it’s unlikely we’ll do anything with this in 1.6, but I do feel some of the ideas could have potential for future versions.
In particular I think incoming links deserve more escalation because they are hidden – they come from another post elsewhere on the site that you can’t obviously see. Whereas outgoing links are already quite obviously visible in the post, so they are a little bit redundant IMO.
Although we’ve always done it, I don’t see the need to list outgoing links. I probably didn’t mind it as much before since there was always ample room in the gutter anyhow. Now that we’ve moved Links into the post stream, it’s taking up prime screen real estate. Whatever we put there better be essential information.
If a link is hard to spot in a post then the post author has done a poor job exposing that link properly. If a link is easy to find in a post, as it should be, then all we’re doing is repeating ourselves.
The one thing I would like to see here is that if a user has created a link without the optional title then the title would be “cooked” with the topic title & post # from the linked post.
This allows me to hover over topics and know exactly what has been linked to without deciphering the URL and perhaps additionally provides more info for accessibility users.
Yes, I’ve already seen in-post links with useless titles (like ‘1’), and the lack of outgoing link listing in the right gutter meant I had no idea which topic was linked.
So, does that mean if I include an outgoing internal link, incoming links won’t be auto-expanded? That is going to cause all sorts of confusion. What if incoming links were inserted into the timeline as suggested by @sam, and outgoing links (if they exist, stay where they currently are, with an option to expand?
Quite clear; outgoing links exist in the post to be clicked on and will have click counters next to them calling them out even more. We can further obfuscate the outgoing link by making them . if you like?
In your reply, mini onebox support (a link to another topic in the same discourse) is already included in the post-links.
The plain text http://meta.discourse.org is not in the list. Assuming it know that http≠https, this is the behavior I’m hoping for… just without having to click “post links”
No, that isn’t what I am concerned about. Where does “this” point to? I don’t want to click a link without knowing where it is going, and I shouldn’t have to look in the small text at the bottom of the screen to see what the actual link is. Mini-onebox support could handle this, however, eliminating the need for outgoing links in the post footer and/or timeline itself.
Edit: I am not concerned about outgoing post visibility, as you point out, blue text is pretty clearly a link somewhere. I am concerned where they point to…but looking up at my original post I see I am getting off-topic from my original thoughts…sorry! Will expand on my thoughts in the Mini-onebox topic.
swoosh links into gutter when post is current. i.e. post #5 has links, when timeline is at 5/x, move links into gutter.
