Topic with URL pasted in title, can't remove the link?

Hi,

Not sure if this is known or not, but just in case…

I created a new topic and accidentally pasted the URL I was going to paste into the body of the topic into the Title field… 100% completely my fault… however, Discourse turned this into a link under the title, yet I am unable to find anyway to remove it?

If you click on it it takes you to a new tab with the page for the URL in question, looks like a really useful bit of functionality, but it would be handy if it was also removable… I’ve tried rebuilding HTML on the off chance, but to no avail.

Screenshot:

In the end I created a new topic and deleted the other, but I wondered if there was a way to remove this once they have been set?

Thanks in advance for any help. :slight_smile:

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That’s a feature of Reddit style topic creation:

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Thanks for the reply…

I’m on 20 out of 75 replies on that thread but haven’t spotted one that mentions an “undo” or “change” kinda option for it. Is the only way to dispose of the topic in question and to start again?

As I say, it was entirely my fault for pasting too quickly…

I don’t think you can undo how the topic was created, but I haven’t really played with this option.

If you want to hide them entirely, you can probably do that with CSS.

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No, its ok, I’ve had a look through the settings and what was in that thread appears to have changed since I think. I don’t think there is a way to change the link after or remove it.

Thanks for the replies though.

I’m guessing you pasted the link, which populated the body and preview, and then you changed the title. That’s the normal flow for these reddit-style topics. If you had cleared the body too, the composer would have been reset and the link removed. We’ve been trying to avoid yet-another UI element for this, but maybe we need it.

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Hi @neil,

That sounds like exactly the steps I took as it happens, I think the only maybe different was that after the link got oneboxed in the body, I changed the title (as you mentioned) and then changed the body. It wasn’t until I had posted that I noticed the little link under the topic. At first I thought it was coming from the URL I had pasted into the body, so I tried removing it but it remained. It was about then I realised the clever title to link functionality which I hadn’t really read about in detail here before but had seen the odd topic mention it so assumed it was related.

Coming at it from a user (one clearly prone to mistakes!) my first thought was about how I would remove it. I tried changing the title again, just to “http://” to see if it would change it at all, but it didn’t, hence then deleting it and recreating it.

The body content is obviously easy to remove if you go wrong, as I did, it’s just the link, having a little hover with edit/remove would probably be what I would have expected once I realised what it was.

It’s not the end of the world, but again, as a user, I wasn’t familiar enough with this feature to appreciate the steps to produce it, or avoid it - I’ve also never used Reddit (as is probably clear from this post!) :slight_smile:

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@neil did eventually add a way to remove topic links, press edit on the topic title and you’ll get a little X to remove the link.

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Thank you for the follow-up Jeff, and to @neil for the functionality, appreciated :slight_smile:

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