I have to say, I have always liked the “create a new topic” helper text alot, and I think it has led to better topic titles. I also think links are going to be rarer - and not every community will want to have them in every category. So I do like the idea of an admin setting to enable link sharing like this.
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I also feel there should be settings for this, not just “it’s on!” Using Stonehearth as an example, we have categories where a link would not be acceptable, like Bug Reports or Support. We want users to explain the issue, not share a link. On the other hand, something like our Gameplay or Fan Media categories would be prime candidates for link posts. Site staff needs control over where links are allowed.
So you want to disallow pasting links in all posts? If you have category policies, they should be enforced regardless of whether someone adds a link to their topic.
No. Links are necessary for sharing information, I don’t want to see the new helper text in the composer nor a link to an external site in certain categories. Not suggesting changing any existing composer permissions, just prevent this change in certain categories.
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Not sure who you’re replying to here but if it’s me then the answer to your question is no. Sorry for the ambiguity in my post. Link sharing is obviously important and I think this is a cool new feature. I just miss the helper text suggesting starting with a brief description, typically in the form of a question. 
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That exists in the category settings:
It’s an incredibly hard to explain setting… here goes.
- If that checkbox IS NOT checked in any category, then “it’s on!” in every category.
- If that checkbox IS check in one or more categories, then featured links are allowed only in those categories.
That checkbox was merged into core as-is from the plugin, but I think a better setting would be a checkbox that is default checked saying “Allow featured links in this category”. Uncheck it to disable featured links in a category.
And of course you can always turn the links off globally.
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I agree that revising the working would make more sense.
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Can you let us know when that is done @neil?
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Yesterday I refactored everything so it doesn’t use custom_fields anymore (completing the work to bring this into core), and then inverted that checkbox’s behaviour. It involves a migration. Since we’re trying to get other important fixes out, I’m waiting to push these changes. Maybe this afternoon they’ll be pushed.
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With this change, is it still necessary to have the global toggle? Seems like that could be removed if you haven’t done so already.
Yes it’s still necessary, otherwise you need to disable it in each category.
Oh… I thought your change was to just make it opt-in for each category
Opt out for each category. It’s on by default.
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For Dansk Dynamit we would have loved to have link posting enabled for every category, instead of having a dedicated link category. It was just simpler to make it category specific for our case.
For a links topic, here are some considerations and learnings we made
- It has to be possible to write your own title to the link - the title of the post often adds subjectivity to the post and sparks the discussion. Title can’t be fetched from link source.
- It has to be easy to discover you can actually post links as a topic - not sure if it is easy to discover / understand that you can simply drop a link into the title to start a link topic
- Links have to be easily accessible from the front page: Clicking the title of a topic will do, and is how it works on sites like Reddit – but you would need to re-think how users access the thread with comments. the way it works now on discourse is not optimal (Click tiny number of replies, click the date from the selector). This is why we made links an “attachment” to the title that you click rather than the title
- It has to be easy to access and discover the discussion on the link: See notes above
Nice to haves
- Make the link functionality how Google Inbox is doing it or how Facebook is doing it. It is **like a onebox link with embedded content is attached to the thread
- Display count on how many people click the link
- Make the first post of the link thread look interesting - can look a bit empty with just the link
- Ability to write more than just the title about the link
Example: Facebook attach link to post
The user experience for attaching links to posts is really good on Facebook Pages
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User creates post which only contains text so far
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First link is dropped in - link is attached to post as a onebox kind of attachment
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User is able to change the text in the onebox or/and add another image
@casperovergaard and I will try make a design sketch on what this could look like this week
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This works in the current shipping feature. Title is auto-filled but can be edited liked any other title.
The help text indicates this is possible. One thing we could do is detect a link in the clipboard, then issue a one-time educational pop-up alert when creating a new topic with a link in your clipboard, letting you know that pasting a link into the title is what you want to do. (We could do it for them, but I have links in my clipboard a lot so that’d be annoying as an ongoing behavior.)
That’s the way it works now in the currently shipping feature. Give it a shot on http://try.discourse.org
clicking the title takes you to the discussion topic like it always does.
The first post has the onebox of the link.
the body is always available for editing, like any topic create
The link will be counted in the first post, but I don’t think clicks to the link in the title will be counted.
The Facebook example would require a different design, for overriding the onebox. It looks like they offer a selection from the available images inside the article so you can select the “right” one. And editing the one box excerpt as well.
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This change has been pushed now. Also fixed today is how these topics were being rendered in the summary emails. They were often showing as blank… 
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Is the “opt-out per category” setting also pushed?
Yes it is! The checkbox now says “Allow featured links in this category”.
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It seems like topic featured links are not allowed in uncategorized but when editing a category it shows the “Allow featured links in this category” checkbox.
Another thing I noted is that if I paste the link first and change category, we’re not observing that change and allow the topic featured link to be created.
Is topic link disabled if the composer is not empty? We should probably update the placeholder to reflect that.
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Hmm, they should be allowed in uncategorized.