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Flow: Obey the Exlinks gadget (open external links in new tab/window)
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Description

The gadget exlinks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Gadget-exlinks.js
is not being obeyed.

(24,000+ accounts have it enabled at Enwiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_reports/User_preferences
and 35,000 Globally, making it the 6th most popular Wikipedia gadget https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Gadgets/wikipedia )


Version: unspecified
Severity: normal

Details

Reference
bz65243

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Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Needs Triage.Nov 22 2014, 3:23 AM
bzimport set Reference to bz65243.
bzimport added a subscriber: Unknown Object (MLST).

Note: Bug submitted on behalf of this issue raised by Risker:

"It is not possible to examine an external link before clicking on it, so one has to trust that the person who inserted the link will not send the reader to a site that might be a problem for that reader. Gonna be honest, there aren't a lot of people I trust that well; even people I know who have acted in good faith have inserted links that I don't want to follow or that will create problems for some users. [Note: admins can click "edit" and see the link, but non-admins cannot do so]"

See the related bug 60465 ("provide View Source (showing the wikitext) of someone's post") for another way to partially resolve this issue.

you could just change the selector from $('a.external') to $('a.external, a[rel="mw:ExtLink"]'). then it would work for all parsoid content, but i don't have an edit button for that gadget.

As an aside, in desktop browsers you can typically see where a link goes by hovering it and looking at the bar on the bottom of the browser(in chrome and firefox, maybe others).

(In reply to Erik Bernhardson from comment #2)

you could just change the selector from $('a.external') to $('a.external,
a[rel="mw:ExtLink"]'). then it would work for all parsoid content, but i
don't have an edit button for that gadget.

Why isn't parsoid adding the 'external' class?

(In reply to Kunal Mehta (Legoktm) from comment #3)

Why isn't parsoid adding the 'external' class?

Hmm, this is also tracked as bug 56756 in Flow which is blocked by 51245 in Parsoid.

I don't think Parsoid is going to change its HTML output, so I suggested making the fix to the gadget's JS code from comment #2 on the gadget's talk page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_talk:Gadget-exlinks.js#Fix_to_support_Parsoid_external_links