Topic link counter stops at 50

Richie · March 29, 2025, 9:47am

Discourse 3.5.0.beta3-dev (afde7cc172).

The link counter displayed at the bottom of a topic seems to stop at 50, even when there are over 1,000 links in the thread:

For reference:

On another topic, this one also says 50:

When there are 250+ links:

Does anyone know what might be causing this?

pfaffman · March 29, 2025, 9:41pm

Without looking at the code, I think that number probably comes from topic_links, so something like

select * from topic_links where topic_id=1234

It does seem like a bug, though.

Richie · March 30, 2025, 10:09am

Interesting, hadn’t spotted that table.

If this helps, there are 4,155 links in this topic id yet it says 50x on the front end:

pfaffman · March 30, 2025, 2:45pm

~~Sounds like a bug. Maybe share the link. Maybe look in the code.~~

Looks like it’s limited to 50 on purpose; I guess that it’s a complicated join and having it do hundreds or thousands would be a performance issue.

github.com/discourse/discourse

app/models/topic_link.rb

main


      
          def self.topic_map(guardian, topic_id)
            # Sam: complicated reports are really hard in AR
            builder = DB.build(<<~SQL)
              SELECT ftl.url,
                     COALESCE(ft.title, ftl.title) AS title,
                     ftl.link_topic_id,
                     ftl.reflection,
                     ftl.internal,
                     ftl.domain,
                     MIN(ftl.user_id) AS user_id,
                     SUM(clicks) AS clicks
              FROM topic_links AS ftl
              LEFT JOIN topics AS ft ON ftl.link_topic_id = ft.id
              LEFT JOIN categories AS c ON c.id = ft.category_id
              /*where*/
              GROUP BY ftl.url, ft.title, ftl.title, ftl.link_topic_id, ftl.reflection, ftl.internal, ftl.domain
              ORDER BY clicks DESC, count(*) DESC
              LIMIT 50
            SQL

Richie · March 30, 2025, 3:44pm

Hmmm

Thanks for the confirmation @pfaffman

I don’t know why we’d show a number to the end user which is completely inaccurate

No information is better than inaccurate information.

I have an idea for an easy solution which doesn’t involve removing this wrong number completely.

I’ll post a suggestion in UX

sam · March 31, 2025, 5:41am

Yeah this lives between bug and ux.

On one hand it only impacts the UI of Discourse, on the other hand it is buggy to show a number that we know is not correct.

I think the simplest fix on our side is to select 51 and then show the text “50+” in the UI if we get 51.

It feels in the realm of pr-welcome, but I will leave @lindsey to triage and decide.

sam · March 31, 2025, 5:43am

Oh I see:

So I guess we take it up there.

Topic		Replies	Views
Suggestion for fixing the inaccurate link counter value UX pr-welcome	3	47	March 31, 2025
Over 1000 replies Bug	5	1520	March 16, 2016
Search Results Limited to 50 each time Bug search	13	3252	August 2, 2017
Small bugs with tracked topics and split topics Bug	5	658	January 22, 2021
Link Click Counter not counting clicks for internal links, or mismatched slugs Bug pr-welcome , click-counter	1	679	August 22, 2024

Topic link counter stops at 50

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