Tech News is unlikely to be the only newsletter or announcement that uses links in topic title. I'm not sure either of the proposed solutions would address that wider issue.

Other solutions include:

• Have Flow support wikitext in topic titles for backwards compatibility with an arguably common user behavior;
• Have MassMessage strip wikitext from topic titles when posting to a Flow page;
• Prevent MassMessage senders from including wikitext in topic titles at all.

In T104914#1432127, @gpaumier wrote:

Tech News is unlikely to be the only newsletter or announcement that uses links in topic title. I'm not sure either of the proposed solutions would address that wider issue.

Other solutions include:

• Have Flow support wikitext in topic titles for backwards compatibility with an arguably common user behavior;

We have no current plans to do this; see T59153: Allow links in Flow topic titles. Note that:

• Including markup in topic titles is not common on the wider web.
• There are other implications on both the frontend (for example, right now you can click the topic title to uncollapse a resolved topic; you would need to click elsewhere in that topic bar if it were a link) and backend
• We may be changing Topic URLs to include the title in the future, which would require stripping this markup when building the URL version (probably not too big a deal)

That leaves Tech News adjusting the messages they're sending, or one of your MassMessage suggestions. @Legoktm can probably speak to MassMessage.

In T104914#1432127, @gpaumier wrote:

Other solutions include:

• Have Flow support wikitext in topic titles for backwards compatibility with an arguably common user behavior;

+1

• Have MassMessage strip wikitext from topic titles when posting to a Flow page;

Eh.

• Prevent MassMessage senders from including wikitext in topic titles at all.

-1

Yeah, I think we should address how to include certain wikitext, especially links.

A few things to consider:

• We need to make sure there we're not including things that would break the feature -- file and category links? Templates? etc.

• How will it appear on history and contributions pages, where the title is already rendered as a link?

• Are we using the wikitext editor for titles? If it's VE, it might add <nowiki> around the links.

Poke @Johan, who will be in charge of TechNews soon.

Is there a simpler way of finding out which pages on the Tech News distribution list are Flow pages than manually going through them?

Is it not preferable to remove wikitext from titles? On French Wikipedia it is a discouraged practice (but I don't know elsewhere).

In T104914#1439679, @DannyH wrote:

Yeah, I think we should address how to include certain wikitext, especially links.

Follow-up: This is now moving forwards as T59153: Allow links in Flow topic titles

• We need to make sure there we're not including things that would break the feature -- file and category links? Templates? etc.

This is addressed by only supporting the same markup supported in edit summaries (which does not include any of those).

• How will it appear on history and contributions pages, where the title is already rendered as a link?

Wikitext, at least initially.

• Are we using the wikitext editor for titles? If it's VE, it might add <nowiki> around the links.

Probably will not support an editor initially.

I'm wondering if T111453 is somehow related. Maybe not.