We did some work on link handling in the shoutbox. This is part of an ongoing effort of several months now to iron out the most severe bugs and issues of the site. Most of these fixes should be invisible to regular users apart from some slight performance increase here or there. The shoutbox changes are the first really visible ones.

• external links will now open in a separate tab
  
• links to some popular external sites, and images now have in-site previews
  

The preview feature can be considered a tier-0 implementation. I've been playing around with a few ideas but there's definitely room for improvement and I'm very open to your feedback.

So far we have previews for:

• Bandcamp
  
• Youtube
  
• imgur (with some unintended cropping that needs to be addresed)
  
• direct links to .jpg (and .jpeg), .png, and .gif files
  
• any site with OpenGraph tags correctly in place (exception: Facebook)
  

Feel free to let me know of any problems and please share your ideas

Quote:
? external links will now open in a separate tab

That doesn't really make a difference to me, I've always opened posted links in a new tab (with the middle mouse scroll button).
But I'm sure there are folks who're happy with it.

Written by Taravilyaion on 13.08.2021 at 17:15
That doesn't really make a difference to me, I've always opened posted links in a new tab (with the middle mouse scroll button).
But I'm sure there are folks who're happy with it.

To be fair that's not just pure convenience, it's also somewhat spam protection. We've been tagging external links such that search engine crawlers ignore them for site ranking for a while now because people were using MS as a vessel to boost their own sites' ranks. The shoutbox was exempt from that for the most part which we fixed in this one. New tabs are a byproduct of that in a way

Ooh, I get what this is now. The links redirect to a new tab even with the left mouse click.

I don't get what those previews are, though. I don't see anything new on the sb...?

Written by Karlabos on 13.08.2021 at 23:47
I don't get what those previews are, though. I don't see anything new on the sb...?

Hover over some of the links.

Also it only works on desktop, as the previews are popups. That UI wouldn't make much sense on a phone. So if you're browsing the site on your phone, that could be why you don't see anything.

Nice! Had to clear to cache to get it to work (previews), but liking it