Shorten every url link in discussion?

alx

I'd like to shorten all my links to bitly, how could it be done?

Artuu

alx The syntax looks like this:

https://discuss.flarum.org/d/id-slug

slug is additionally placed for seo. All you have to do is enter the https://discuss.flarum.org/d/20167.

jordanjay29

alx I suggest you look at the code for Flagrow Affiliation Links to see how they transform links. That would be a good place to start.

Moitah

I think he means automatically transform every URL a user types in a discussion to a bitly one.

luceos

There's no such extension yet.

alx

jordanjay29 Hey Jordan, although this extension doesn’t solve the problem (read answer above for what I’m trying to do) I tried to implement the affiliation extension.

There’s no settings showing up to define what link should be replaced. Where do you define those?

clarkwinkelmann

Can I ask what the purpose is ?

If it's for tracking purposes, Google Analytics or Matomo should be able to record clicks on normal links. This should work both with the Flagrow Analytics extension but also by just pasting the tracking code in the custom header.

If you want to redirect users to an advertisement page, then the Affiliation Links extension as linked above can be a good way to redirect every url to an "exit page" where you can show whatever you want to the user before redirecting to the url. Please note that the Affiliation Links extension hasn't been updated for beta 8 yet, and there are currently no plans to do so unless someone pays for the update 😉

To actually go and create bitly links for every url, a more complex extension will have to be written. And I can't really understand what purpose that would serve.

alx

clarkwinkelmann in short a lot of my users will be posting links to pdfs. Those links can be over 200 characters which takes a considerable space in the discussion.

clarkwinkelmann

alx which takes a considerable space in the discussion

You could use markdown [label](url) or bbcode [URL=url]label[/URL] syntax so the urls don't appear as-it in the discussion.

Or an extension could be written to shorten links with elipsis if they are longer than a given length. Maybe this can even be achieved to some extend via CSS by targeting a in the discussion and using text-overflow: elipsis. The problem with a CSS-only approach is that such a rule wouldn't be able to make the difference between a link with a text label and a link whose label is the link itself (only the latter you want to shorten visually I believe)

alx There’s no settings showing up to define what link should be replaced

Affiliation Links hasn't been upgraded to work with beta 8, and it's low in priority because it has very few users (it can be upgraded as paid work if you need it). When used on a compatible version, you should be able to open the settings from the extension page and add a rule.

Pollux

alx

What about a pure CSS solution?

Take this as a starting point:

.Post-body a {
    display: inline-block;
    white-space: nowrap;
    vertical-align: bottom;
    max-width: 30%;
    overflow: hidden;
    text-overflow: ellipsis;
}

You can add this code to your custom CSS in the admin panel.