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3 Comments

Brought Back Support for Link Posts

Once upon a time, the Indie Hackers forum supported link posts. It was a simple way to share a link without additional commentary, with the benefit that anyone who clicks it from the forum will be taken directly to the link.

I removed this functionality during a big forum rewrite, in part to focus on discussion posts. But discussion posts are doing great, and I'd like to add some more variety to the mix by bringing link posts back.

More specifically, discussion posts can get a bit stale over time, as similar topics and questions reappear from month to month. They also tend to limit conversation a bit. If something interesting happens elsewhere on the web, link posts make it trivially easy to share and see what other indie hackers think about it.

The risk with link posts is that they're so easy to make that they risk flooding the /newest feed. And, in my opinion, they're only as valuable as the discussion they generate.

For now, link posts are open to people with 20+ points, in which case you can make them by clicking the link icon when creating a post. I might lower that later. Let's see how it goes!

  1. 4

    Hi!
    I'm pretty new to IH, and I had a very hard time figuring out why it said "Sorry, you're not allowed to post this" when I tried to make a post in a group until I stumbled upon this by accident.
    This makes a lot of sense though, it'd just be great to get a little pop up that tells you why your post is rejected - it's frustrating to not know what's wrong.
    Thanks for your hard work!

    1. 2

      I think you're actually running into a slightly different issue: our spam protection.

      Link posts — like this one from @rosiesherry — are posts that feature links and no original commentary from the person who creates the thread.

      On the other hand, our algorithm for spam protection prevents new accounts from posting any links in their first-ever threads — even if they are normal threads (as opposed to link post threads). This is to combat the armies of bots that hit our site every day and create new accounts and new threads linking back to unrelated commercial products.

      The catch is that we can't create very clear messaging around why these posts are being denied or else we'll educate the hackers on how to outsmart our algorithm.

      Sorry for the confusion!

  2. 2

    love that you continue to update and share your progress! lmk how i can help!

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