Hey wonderful Discourse community!
As you are all aware, there is an existing feature to share a post.
When this share button is pressed, a pop-up appears and looks like:
The full link provided in the image above is:
https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-should-short-links-be-supported-in-discourse/15339/22
Notice how long this link is?
Why is this a problem?
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For some topics the slug can be so long that the shared URL wont even fit within the maximum character limit for some social media platforms. This has a negative impact on the community sharing form posts outside of the forum on social media to generate additional forum traffic.
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Some social media platforms don’t allow clickable links or even copying text. So users need to manually type out the URL to access the link. Having a super long link increases the chances of a mis-click on the keyboard resulting in a broken link.
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It looks messy sharing super long links.
There is already a manual solution
There is a feature already built into Discourse which allows you to replace the slug, with a dash, and the link will still work. Both of these links go to the same place. But the first one is drastically shorter.
https://meta.discourse.org/t/-/15339/22
https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-should-short-links-be-supported-in-discourse/15339/22
My proposal is
A) Update the share post pop-up to replace the existing (long URLS containing slugs) with short-links (slugs replaced with “-”).
B) By default enable short-links (slugs replaced with “-”) include a button on the share post pop-up screen that lets the user choose the URL type (long or short).
C) A site setting for site admins to enable or disable based on their preference of a global setting for sharing URLs.
What are your thoughts?
