External link opening in same tab

meetdilip

Once upon a time, we target="_blank"'d all anchors... but I'm of the belief that a website should not override the default behaviour of an anchor. If a user wishes to view a link in another tab, ctrl-click should suffice.

Now, obviously, not everybody shares that opinion, and this is where that outgoing link plugin comes in handy

I activated the plug in and restarted. Still the same

meetdilip

I used this plugin

nodebb-plugin-outside

frissdiegurke

@julian said:

I'm of the belief that a website should not override the default behaviour of an anchor. If a user wishes to view a link in another tab, ctrl-click should suffice.

Exactly my opinion

@meetdilip which link do you mean? that one in composer-help? nodebb-plugin-outside only take effect on posts, not on the whole page.

I will not support a way to do so for the link in composer-help because target="_blank" is just wrong. It doesn't allow to open the link in the same page any more (at least in common browsers with techniques I know).

@meetdilip said:

As it is new, many won't bother to come back

I really doubt this

a_5mith

Just had a look at the plugin and it uses a target="_new" which isn't valid HTML5 or 4 (or even XHTML for that matter). The target attribute was deprecated in HTML4. In HTML5 this decision was reversed, and it is an official part of the spec again.

However as you can see, it's use is controversial at best. The only time I would use it, is if I were building a form that didn't save progress and needed to offer more help for a specific field, but even then, I'd probably just concise whatever I was pointing to as a tooltip so that the user wasn't timed out.

The cause for losing people on a forum when they click away from a site is usually down to the fact if they get taken away, then come back, their post progress has vanished, typing it out again is a chore and they don't bother. If it's still there, they will finish compiling that post. Your bounce rate won't be affected by a significant margin because of it.

However whether you should or shouldn't use it is irrelevant, your question was "How do I do it", that should be the question we are answering. (Support forums are renowned for not actually answering a question, but just ridiculing why they think it shouldn't be done. Which I don't agree with, unless it's a friendly warning towards the end.)

meetdilip

@frissdiegurke said:

@meetdilip which link do you mean? that one in composer-help? nodebb-plugin-outside only take effect on posts, not on the whole page.

I found a plugin with that name on ACP > Plugins. Installed and activated it. There is a sticky thread in introduction about smilies. I can given the link to emoji cheat sheet page. When someone click it, it take to that page on same tab over riding current forum. No offence but on numerous forums I have seen an external link will not take you away from the forum.

PS : I managed to guess this much. What you guys are talking sounds like rocket science to me

frissdiegurke

In this case just remove the sticky thread once updated to a emoji-extended version up from 0.2.3-1. It's mentioned within help-tab of composer then...

meetdilip

@frissdiegurke said:

In this case just remove the sticky thread once updated to a emoji-extended version up from 0.2.3-1. It's mentioned within help-tab of composer then...

Thanks. But didn't follow. Do I need to update plug in ? In ACP it shows up to date.

psychobunny

Just as an aside, if your user is in the middle of composing a post, it means that they've already registered. At that point I think bounce rate is negligible because you have ways to attract them back (ex. daily digest emails, part of core)

frissdiegurke

@meetdilip Ya, it's not up to date on http://www.techiewiz.in/ is it NodeBB 0.4.x? then you can run npm update nodebb-plugin-emoji-extended to update. after server-restart a link should be within composer-help.

meetdilip

@frissdiegurke said:

@meetdilip Ya, it's not up to date on http://www.techiewiz.in/ is it NodeBB 0.4.x? then you can run npm update nodebb-plugin-emoji-extended to update. after server-restart a link should be within composer-help.

Thanks

Yes 0.4.1