Disabling links?

durabone

Jedi Council Member
Just to make sure I understand this. If I place and underscore '_' before 'http' then I must cut and paste such a URL into a browser. That means that the forwarded clicks are not credited back to the forum via bots et al, but rather somewhere else. Is that why I disable the link? Thanks.
 
Here is a good description from Nomad:

Nomad said:
Just an extra note, as you are new to the forum: if you are planning to add a link, and you think this guy is disinformation or you just don't know then the thing to do is put an underscore at the beginning of the link like so: _http://www.whatever
In this way, people can still look it up if they choose, but it is not made into an active link, so is not accessible to search engine web-crawlers etc.
 
Yeah we only disable links to disinfo sites so that we don't improve their google rankings.
 
Hello,

I noticed that some posts have links disabled, sometimes by their author and other times by a moderator. Is this required? Or advisable?

I also noticed this is done for external links while links to other Cassiopaea threads remain enabled. Is this a correct observation?

I'd like to help decrease moderators workload if I can :)
 
We prefer links to questionable or disinfo sites to be deactivated. We don't want to support those sites. But links to sott articles, youtube, trusted sites, etc. are fine to leave live. If you are unsure if a website is trusted, I would say to disable them.
 
Beau said:
We prefer links to questionable or disinfo sites to be deactivated. We don't want to support those sites. But links to sott articles, youtube, trusted sites, etc. are fine to leave live. If you are unsure if a website is trusted, I would say to disable them.

Awesome, thank you for clarifying it Beau. I'll make sure to disable links to "questionable" sites, or those whose credibility I'm not sure of.
 
gaman said:
Here is a good description from Nomad:

Nomad said:
Just an extra note, as you are new to the forum: if you are planning to add a link, and you think this guy is disinformation or you just don't know then the thing to do is put an underscore at the beginning of the link like so: _http://www.whatever
In this way, people can still look it up if they choose, but it is not made into an active link, so is not accessible to search engine web-crawlers etc.

Thanks for the information. I will definitely be doing that from now on.
 
I was wondering what the forum's policy is on enabling/disabling links to articles from news websites that are considered objective. Enabling them would mean the objective message is spread more but I thought I'd ask.

If the answer is 'leave them enabled' a list of news websites that this forum endorses would be very helpful. I can't say I entirely trust my own judgement :)
 
Ant22 said:
I was wondering what the forum's policy is on enabling/disabling links to articles from news websites that are considered objective. Enabling them would mean the objective message is spread more but I thought I'd ask.

If the answer is 'leave them enabled' a list of news websites that this forum endorses would be very helpful. I can't say I entirely trust my own judgement :)

I would count that rt.com, sputniknews, zerohedge and southfront are definitely safe sites. There are also many sites I'm not aware of. I think the list could then go on and on and comes back then to your own judgment if a site is trustworthy or not in the end, since the internet is also changing pretty fast. Have you for example a site where you are not sure?
 
Gawan said:
(...)
I would count that rt.com, sputniknews, zerohedge and southfront are definitely safe sites. There are also many sites I'm not aware of. I think the list could then go on and on and comes back then to your own judgment if a site is trustworthy or not in the end, since the internet is also changing pretty fast. Have you for example a site where you are not sure?

Hi Gawan, thanks for the reply and the list you provided. I don't have any particular site in mind, I recently posted an article from RT and I was wondering whether a link to a source like this should be enabled. I thought that maybe there was a reason why it shouldn't that I wasn't aware of, despite the site's objectivity.

Obviously even MSM websites post useful data. My guess is that the idea behind disabling links is that an article can have useful or credible data but the website as such is not always objective, hence we shouldn't promote it.

Another thing is that when I'm looking for information on a specific topic I start with a general online search. Apart from enabling/disabling links, the reason I asked for a list of credible news websites was that this will simply enable me to start my search there.

Plus, I'd like to follow these sources on Twitter to have more quality news coming my way regularly, so thanks again :)
 
Leave all links working. If there's a problematic link, a moderator can disable it.
 
Niall said:
Leave all links working. If there's a problematic link, a moderator can disable it.

Yeeeeah... Originally, ages ago, we disabled links because we ended up with active links to sites defaming Laura + Cass, and we didn't want to either:

1. Drive traffic to them

2. Let them see people coming from this forum for strategic reasons

This then incorrectly exploded into never actively linking to anyone.

Of course, it's never good to link to disinfo sites, but frankly the amount of traffic those sites will be getting from this forum amounts to a hill of beans. There are also other methods of tracking that don't involve links at all, so nowadays it's less important. Also, what people are sharing on social media seems to be way more important.

So, probably best if people stop worrying about it, and let mods deal with it if necessary as Niall said. Trying to turn this into a hard and fast rule that everyone is clearly worried about is kind of a waste of energy at this point, IMO.
 
Scottie said:
Niall said:
Leave all links working. If there's a problematic link, a moderator can disable it.

Yeeeeah... Originally, ages ago, we disabled links because we ended up with active links to sites defaming Laura + Cass, and we didn't want to either:

1. Drive traffic to them

2. Let them see people coming from this forum for strategic reasons

This then incorrectly exploded into never actively linking to anyone.

Of course, it's never good to link to disinfo sites, but frankly the amount of traffic those sites will be getting from this forum amounts to a hill of beans. There are also other methods of tracking that don't involve links at all, so nowadays it's less important. Also, what people are sharing on social media seems to be way more important.

So, probably best if people stop worrying about it, and let mods deal with it if necessary as Niall said. Trying to turn this into a hard and fast rule that everyone is clearly worried about is kind of a waste of energy at this point, IMO.

That makes sense and thanks for further explanation. I also saw recently that on a mobile links are still clickable even when deactivated and I don't know if this also ever had an effect or where still active. And of course a hard rule or list would needed to be updated regularly and as I tried to explain yesterday, with the fast living internet nowadays a list would never be completed.
 
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