Feature consideration: Backlinks
We often have people link to other topics on the forum.
It would be helpful that those links would appear on the page of the topic being linked to as well - like, automatic backlinks, ie. "This topic was referenced in XYZ"
Linked from:
KajMagnus @KajMagnus2020-02-13 22:03:39.943ZThis sounds nice. Where could be good places to show backlinks? What about 1) below the original post, maybe show the 3 most popular pages linking in, and more links, collapsed, and 2) in the progress section as they appear? (here sorted by time)
How GitHub does backlinks, or, they seem to call it "topic mentions":
https://github.com/webdriverio/webdriverio/issues/3024#ref-pullrequest-453805774 (scroll up just a little bit).
(I suppose you've seen this somewhere at GitHub already :- )) "pathmapper mentioned this issue on Jun 14, 2019"A related thing, would be to also auto show the title of the topic being linked to,
on the page with the link, instead of the not-so-human-friendly links I get now when I click the copy-link button, e.g.:https://www.talkyard.io/-326to this topic (not so readable link).(Also, not now but in the distant future, I've been thinking about auto creating backlinks from e.g. HackerNews or Reddit etc, for bloggers & blog posts, in their embedded comments section.)
- In reply tochrscheuer⬆:KajMagnus @KajMagnus2020-03-30 05:37:21.822Z
It'd also be nice with Wiki style linking between different pages. E.g. at Wikipedia:
[[Target Page Name#Target section|Link text]]. And if typing such a link, and clicking it, before the linked page exists, one could get a question "Do you want to create a new page with the title Target Page Name?" - GIn reply tochrscheuer⬆:Graham D Johnson @gdjohnson
Really wonderful feature, thanks @KajMagnus !
KajMagnus @KajMagnus2021-02-14 14:10:33.959Z(Makes me curious about what makes you like backlinks that much :- ) ?
How would not having backlinks change how your community (if any) works / wouldn't work?Maybe that's an a bit weird question, still, maybe if I understand in which ways backlinks are unusually(?) important to you, it'll be simpler for me to think about & understand the implications / benefits of other future upcoming features)
- Progresswith doing this idea
- KajMagnus @KajMagnus2020-06-10 01:31:50.382Z
Slightly starting working with this now — because I'm adding external link previews (e.g. Twitter tweet), as discussed / requested here: https://www.talkyard.io/-194#post-16
... and then I need to look at all links, and keep a table about links, and then i might as well start tracking backlinks at the same time.
- KajMagnus @KajMagnus2020-07-12 12:21:25.967Zreplies tochrscheuer⬆:
This is almost done now — and ... This turned out to have been a rabbit hole leading down to Caves of Complexity (for example, updating backlinks, if the link*ing* page gets deleted, or access permissions changed, and different people having different access permission and thus can see different backlinks, or a post that links to the page, gets moved to a different page, and .... many other things that can render the backlinks out-of-date), took longer than what I thought.
Now just a little bit code review left, + adding some more tests :- )
- KajMagnus @KajMagnus2020-08-23 13:43:53.827Z
Now there're backlinks — have a look at the top of this page. Not deployed to Prod yet though.
Any thoughts?
Existing contents will not be re-indexed, at this time. But some time later, everything will slowly slowly get reindexed in the background, so backlinks appear also for old links (created before this feature existed).
- KajMagnus @KajMagnus2020-09-02 16:08:53.059Zreplies tochrscheuer⬆:
Backlinks are now available on your site. (Deployed to Prod some days ago.)
If you add new links, feel free to report back about backlinks you might (should) then see on the linked page.