I think it’s because you can add things like .rss, so if you finish off a sentence in brackets with a link the full stop then Discourse thinks it’s all part of the URL. [Link: https://meta.discourse.org/t/new-to-discourse-start-here/1.]: [Link: https://meta.discourse.org/t/new-to-discourse-start-h…

Thanks all. Looks as though this is a Markdown thing rather than just Discourse, and there are two potential solutions when a sentence within brackets ends with a URL: Surround the URL with angle brackets, though this doesn’t display the URL as the topic title, and the link won’t work when quoted…

i don’t understand why you are including periods and exclamation marks as part of the links. and why are you using the square brackets like that? what is the use case you are doing? [Link: https://meta.discourse.org/t/new-to-discourse-start-here/1 .]

(Sometimes sentences appear within round or square brackets.)

i was probably overthinking what you are trying to do. you are just talking about random use of square brackets i assume. yea they can break stuff occasionally in markdown links.

It’s not entirely a markdown thing, or at least it doesn’t seem to be based on what https://markdownviewer.org/ does. There, .) at the end is not treated as part of the URL though .] is. Also, rather than “random use of square brackets” it’s the use of a URL at the end of a sentence which is in bra…

yea welcome to square bracket fun in markdown. there is a reason i never use them unless fenced by code. i guess discourse could escape those?

This is the default behavior of GitHub - markdown-it/linkify-it: Links recognition library with full unicode support · GitHub . You can test it at linkify-it demo

To explictly choose where the link starts/ends, you can use angle brackets like this: [Link: <https://meta.discourse.org/t/new-to-discourse-start-here/1>.] [Link: https://meta.discourse.org/t/new-to-discourse-start-here/1 .]

yea that’s exactly how i did this (i guess i should have given the code tho lol) [image] Lilly: [Link: https://meta.discourse.org/t/new-to-discourse-start-here/1 .]

[image] david: To explictly choose where the link starts/ends, you can use angle brackets Good to know, thanks! Edit: That link works, though it’s not showing the topic title. I’ll stick to omitting the full stop :slight_smile: [image] Lilly: yea that’s exactly how i did this That lin…

Some characters after URL mean topic link doesn't work

Support

Lilly (Lillian ) May 7, 2026, 6:16pm 11

works just fine for me - i think quote removed the angle brackets

[Link: https://meta.discourse.org/t/new-to-discourse-start-here/1.]

Topic		Replies	Views
Markdown links do not interpret parenthesis in URLs correctly Feature markdown	4	278	May 9, 2025
URLs in parenthesis do not turn into links Feature	12	3018	October 20, 2025
Links broken with (at least) two underscores in URL Bug	9	2068	June 15, 2022
Unexpected link and formatting issues in discourse posts Support	1	49	February 3, 2026
Emphasis links do not work Bug markdown-it-review	3	1908	June 26, 2017

Some characters after URL mean topic link doesn't work

Related topics