There have been a number of questions about how to create and visit a linked topic. A general rule of etiquette in the forums is to try to keep discussions on topic. Postings should always be relevant to the original topic post. If the discussion drifts off a new topic should be created to respectfully allow the original discussion to continue and not drift or be hijacked. These instructions should help you with how to create a linked topic and then identify and visit linked topics in discourse discussions.
###Creating a Linked Topic
If you visit a topic and wish to post but feel the post is “off-topic” then you should create a linked topic. So in an example shown below you need to hover your cursor over the post for which you wish to create a linked topic. A notional cursor is shown and it is circled.
When you hover the cursor you will see a link pop up (automagically) called “Reply as linked Topic.” I’ve circled that in red. Click that. That will create a new topic post that has an underlying link back to the original topic. It will quote the post that you replied to. You can then edit the post title, the category, change the quoting and then create your “off-topic” reply.
I have done this in this case and will now show you how to:
###Visit a Linked Topic
Now, when you visit the original post where you clicked “Reply as linked Topic” you will see a new link. In this case I created a post called “How to Create and Visit a Linked Topic.” You can see it in the upper right. If you now click that you will visit the linked topic.
Hope that helps.
ps. Note that you must somehow preserve the text which “continues” the discussion and the quoted text to fully link between the topics.
pps. There is a bug which means that clicking the link between linked topics may not properly display the page but if your refresh the page it will come up. 1: Urban Dictionary: Thread Hijacking
thanks for the more in-depth info, Brian. I can’t see the linked (the new thread you created, which is the one we are on now) thread, when I click on “Creating and Visiting Linked Topics” in the original thread. I get a message “The page you requested doesn’t exist or is private”
Unfortunately due to a bug the page does not immediately come up. However if your refresh the page it comes up. I have no idea why. Traversing the link in the opposite direction also gives that erroneous behavior. Again a refresh fixes it.
Yeah. It’s a bug. If I get time later this afternoon I’ll try to look into it enough further to figure out who “owns” it.
But in the meantime, as Brian mentions in his PPS at the bottom of his post, a workaround is to refresh the page with the error message (screen cap below). Note: I think the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+R will refresh the page for all modern browsers.
Here is a screen shot of the error message Phoenixbound is referring to. If you refresh this page you should then be taken to the linked topic. It’s an annoying PITA, but it can be coped with until it (eventually) gets fixed.
I attempted to duplicate the problem in the try.discourse.org sandbox site by creating a reply linked to a new topic and then seeing what happened when I used the link to go to the new topic and then to return from the new topic to view the post originally replied to.
Since this site and the sandbox site are both currently using Discourse 1.3.0.beta9, it seems most likely to me that someone “improved” something in the TuDiabetes.org site version of the Discourse code and this ended up breaking how these links work here.
By the way … funny story … you get different results depending on which link at the top of this discussion you use to attempt to return to the view the post this discussion was spun off from. Go figure, eh?
Thanks for the detailed bug report, everyone! I found the problem, fixed it, repaired old links, and deployed the bug fix.
As some background on why we had this bug: Discourse’s support for being served from a subfolder is new. A subfolder means an address like www.tudiabetes.org/forum, whereas most Discourse installs are served from a subdomain like forum.tudiabetes.org. We handled most of the places where this difference matters, but there are bound to be a few spots that we missed, like the linked topic links.
