Thanks everyone for the feedback
We will do that (it's also discussed in the GitHub issue). I'm not sure how it got introduced but sharing referers can be a good thing to let other websites know about you. Only nofollow is required to prevent spammers using websites to promote their own.
And if your forum is supposed to be secret, you can easily enfore a noreferer policy by configuring the server headers anyway.
010101 I was thinking clarkwinkelmann was talking about topics opening in new windows
Yes sorry if there was some ambiguity. We are talking about all links inside of the post body. Part of the content written by the user.
I think the same rules apply to content written inside of the post bio (though bio is no longer an official feature so it can be handled separately).
010101 I don't think the admin should open in a new tab either
I have no idea why we're doing things that way. I don't think we have any good reason to force opening the admin in a new tab either. I'll open an issue to get this updated as well.
Pollux Repeatedly I have lost content because hitting the back button didn't bring me back to the point from where I came
This is probably one of the reasons Flarum has been opening links in new tabs since so long. I feel that if Flarum doesn't handle the back button properly, then it should be reported and fixed as its own separate bug. Forcing a new tab just to avoid that seems like trying to avoid fixing another existing problem.
matteocontrini where there's the chance that you lose some input or similar.
True. But we have control over that. Flarum should warn you if you try leaving the page with unsaved content. Extensions should do the same. It should covers navigating away from the page, closing the tab or shutting down the browser.
Also an extension could force links to open in a new tab while the post composer is open if it's really a concern.
matteocontrini If you're really going to do this I feel this should be configurable by forum admins, if it's feasible
If we add a setting for that in core, then we will have made it more bloated than before, which is the opposite of what we want to do here. Ideally it could be its own core extension, but I don't know if we want to add a new core extension just now. It could be a third-party extension in the meantime.
Pollux I think that internal links within user posts (e.g. links to other discussions / posts) should not open in new windows. This is, in my opinion, unexpected
I know this has always been an issue. And if we implement this change it still won't fully solve it because internal links will still trigger a full page reload instead of navigating inside the single page app (I think). We need to handle this separately (is there already an issue for it ?)
Pollux I can argue in good conscience that most of my users expected this behaviour.
I don't have any data on which forum platforms do it and which don't. It's probably something we want to take a look at before making a choice. Anyone knows about an existing research on this ?
I don't remember anyone bringing this up on the forum. But the issue has been opened for a long time on GitHub so we'd like to discuss it so we can finally decide whether we want to do it or not.
Keep the feedback coming đ
