Oh interesting. Like one of those many nostalgia services that show you “on this day 3 years ago…”
Lots of people enjoy that. Good idea!
Make autodownsizing of photo uploads. Your default settings mean iPhones can’t upload pictures.
This seems like something the forum s/w could help with. Maybe store or fingerprint the link target when posted and provide some warnings before it glibly serves the same link after the domain has been pirated years later? Or use some sort of link blacklist and do some pre-fetching and safety checks? I’m probably not web/hosting literate enough to suggest a fix, but someone should have an idea how to prevent old link landmines like this which may be buried here.
Why? Bad content people may link to is not the purview of the forum software.
Google does block known bad links from their index (warns about them) and so does browser software. Those are much more logical places to do this.
I’d argue that it’s because the forum is a community, so you should do what you can to make it a safe place.
If I had realized the thread was many years old, I might have thought twice. As it was, it was a link in the sig file of someone I sorta kinda recognized as being legit. I don’t think you have to scan sites like Google, but maybe a warning based on the date the link had been added to the thread would have been helpful to me.
I mean, this is from forum software that gleefully chastises for people who engage in troubleshooting after the link has been clicked. If you can do that, you ought to be able to do this.
Help a brother out. Throw me a fricken bone, dude!
I can understand that view. But the people reading the forum do the initial screening of the link, so it’s unlikely a newly posted link would affect many people before someone reported it and I expect it would be deleted or disabled.
The useful purview the forum software could perform would be noticing and warning if an old link was hijacked or on a different site or host than initially. It’s not uncommon for small domains which expire to be snapped up by spammers or malware distributors. Could you fingerprint the site/host a few weeks after posted and put up a warning if it differs and has been a long time (~?) since posting?
I see it’s not likely it would hit a large number of people, but it hit a couple here and caused hours of pain.
How would this even work? Every link older than X years, we pop an annoying “hey this link is 3 years old be careful out there, poncho!”
And we would know that… how? What exact source tells us when URLs are “bad”? And it’s our job to check that on every single click of all links? Because who knows when a link to something bad might be posted!
At best this is plugin material.
Here’s your 🍖: run a modern OS and a recent browser, with up to date patches.
This is not the job of the forum software. This is the job of the browser.
It’s actually extremely common for bad actors to steal a user’s login to a highly-ranked/legitimate forum and edit posts several years old to point to their spam site, hijacking that forum’s pagerank. I think detecting and dealing with that would be a reasonable baseline feature.
Of course that’s not what happened here-- the posts weren’t changed, the owner of the URL changed. It would be pretty neat to get a plugin that changes all occurrances of URL http://X to http://Y. I’m certainly not going to do it by hand.
Not possible, since edits aren’t allowed to posts older than X days by default in Discourse. I believe the default is 180 days last time I checked.
Woof, woof! :)
Nice! Sensible defaults go a long way.
I guess they could still edit a months old post and have it not be noticed, but that’s much less likely.
I noticed that when threads are split or merged, the notification isn’t that helpful, especially in the former case. When the back/scroll debate got pulled out of the like experiment thread, the notification I saw was ‘wumpus has moved The Great Like Experiment 2017’, which is a little misleading. That thread didn’t move, but my post inside of it did. I never actually found the new thread, because I interact with Qt3 primarily through the notification panel, plus New and Unread.
It would be nice if splitting a thread sent a notification along the lines of, “so-and-so moved your post to New Thread Name and Link”, so that the destination is accessible through the notification.
Edit: also, if I reply to a thread and immediately go to the Unread view, sometimes my own post shows up as unread. As a practical matter, I can’t think of any time where ‘your post in a thread is posted, but you haven’t seen it yet’ is useful information.
That would be a valuable notification, I agree.
And I have the same problem with my own post marking a thread as unread. Pretty annoying!
Just a reminder that rather than “jamming the page keys”, you can jump to any numbered post in the topic via the keyboard shortcut # key. Like so:
As always press the ? key to see the complete list of keyboard shortcuts.
How so? I just posted in this topic, as I’ve posted in many topics, and I don’t see it marked as unread? What’s the repro here?
Also adding the internal topic anchor link issue here for continued discussion – though I am still unconvinced that’s an actual problem that would confuse average users (because basically nobody has complained about it in the four years I’ve been working on this; simply changing scroll position in the current topic is not “a new web page” that you need to go back from), I’m open to the idea that we could switch one behavior with another and see if people then begin to complain… or if there is the usual silence, then it doesn’t matter if we change it one way or the other.
Yep I get it too.
Get what too?
My own post flagging a topic as unread.
What’s the specific repro? Post then immediately click the back button within 100ms or so?
