Topic link suppression for quoted blocks

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

I think we need to open a bit of discussion about some long term link suppression we had in place.

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/lib/pretty_text.rb#L280

In English this means: “Please ignore any links that are in aside.quote or .elided classes.”

In even more English this means that if you quote something, we ignore all the links you quoted for topic linking, meaning we don’t track bi-directional links for that case.

So for example:

• Say I am writing a reply in topic T1
• I am quoting a post on topic T2
• Inside the quote there is a link to T3

There is no link between T1 <-> T3 cause this is ignored.

I am not 100% certain this is correct. I think the more internal links exist, the better. There is a connection between T1 and T3.

Note: recently this our post pipeline changed somewhat and this rule started stripping out internal links between oneboxed topics and posts. This is clearly not desirable.

I think we should just junk this suppression altogether, I don’t see and value… not sure about the .elided one as well, seems odd.

@codinghorror @eviltrout @zogstrip thoughts?

[zogstrip (Régis Hanol)]

@sam

Note: recently this our post pipeline changed somewhat and this rule started stripping out internal links between oneboxed topics and posts. This is clearly not desirable.

This was due to the onebox sanitizer that was stripping the data-topic and data-post on the aside element. This was fixed in

FIX: wasn't extracting links to quoted posts

@sam

I think we should just junk this suppression altogether, I don’t see and value… not sure about the .elided one as well, seems odd.

I’m fine removing these suppressions but we need to be careful with TL0.

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

I think it is fine with @zogstrip’s fix.

[tophee (Christoph)]

@sam

So for example:

Say I am writing a reply in topic T1
I am quoting a post on topic T2
Inside the quote there is a link to T3

There is no link between T1 <-> T3 cause this is ignored.

I am not 100% certain this is correct. I think the more internal links exist, the better. There is a connection between T1 and T3.

I am also uncertain about whether those second order quotes should be linked. Maybe it’s worth trying out just to see it’s effects and revert upon complaints?

But I have another quote/link related concern:

I’m writing a reply in topic T1
I’m quoting a post P7 in topic T2

That quote from T2 unfolds if a reader clicks on it but there is no direct link leading from the quote box back to the original post in T2. So readers have no easy way of finding the P7 in its original context.

Even worse in a long and complicated thread it is looks like that quote is from T1.

Wouldn’t it make sense to include a link back to the original topic if a quote is not from the current topic?