Share Link to Post Function - Changed/Broken

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I just noticed that the “Share Link to Post” function (the little link icon that shows up at the bottom of every post) no longer lets you just get the URL to that post directly.

Instead, it pops up a “Sharing Menu”, which requires multiple steps (all of which involve some other program) to get to the URL. Previously this used to be the raw URL, with a couple of buttons to post to a few social media sites.

I don’t know if this is a Discourse change, something that’s been customized, or some OS-level policy change, but it’s going to seriously impact how easy it is to refer to other posts (multiple clicks instead of one, and waiting on other programs to respond - so that you can then do multiple clicks in that program to extract the actual link).

There does not seem to be a user-level preference for it.

I cannot see making future reference/link heavy posts if this is how it has to work.

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Not sure why the above has changed … BUT …

As an alternative, you can click the “timestamp” (top right of the individual post) to get the previous behavior.

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Great tip!!! I was struggling with this recently, and the timestamp sharing function is what I was hoping for. Thank you!

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Hmm that’s strange. I still see it as the same link as before.

06%20PM
Screen Shot 2019-04-29 at 1.01.06 PM.png1640×1136 180 KB

I’ll take a look into it though as we haven’t run a backend update for a bit so everything should still be the same.

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Most odd!

It’s been doing weird things for a couple of weeks, depending on what OS/browser I’ve been using.

It’s not necessarily a Discourse thing, either … but I’m unaware of any OS or browser changes between the last time I used it (most days) and today.

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Hmm I just went in with Safari on my phone and I see when I click the link it wants to go through Apple’s iOS options which was definitely not something that was happening before. You can still click Copy on it and it copies the post URL but it definitely wasn’t doing that before last week.

I know they have an App for mobile that they are constantly tweaking with updated icons and functions. I do so see that 5 days ago one of the devs posted a bug fix for :

  • Improves share/invite behavior on mobile and especially iOS (#7416)

So that could very well be the issue if you are using Safari as a browser on Desktop or browsing on Mobile. I’ll see if there is a way we can reverse the changes as I assume that the iOS sharing menu is what is popping up now?

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Yes, on both desktop and iOS Safari.

There’s no “Copy” to click on the sharing menu on macOS, though it is there in iOS. Right clicking does not yield anything other than the normal element options (which don’t include copy). Clicking it and doing CMD-C does nothing in macOS Safari.

It’s been doing odd things in Chrome under Windows for a while (sometimes the current behavior, sometimes the old behavior, with no apparent rhyme or reason as to why).

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Yes so it appears they have swapped it over for iOS to only be able to click timestamp now. Jeff Atwood discusses it here. The Discourse devs tend to be pretty set in their ways but I’ll see if there isn’t a work around that we can implement.

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As long as they don’t take away the option via the timestamp, it’s fine (for me). If they do, it becomes a fundamental pain in the arse!

Fingers crossed on that, I guess! :wink:

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Definitely! It’s not the most user friendly though as the the 11%20PM icon is a pretty obvious signal to link to a post whereas the timestamp you really only know if you click on it.

But let’s hope they just leave it as is and don’t try to “improve” it any more!

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