thomasfrank09

Samuel,

I understand the arguments, but I think it’s fair to emphasize that this is an opinion not everyone holds. I read a few articles yesterday saying the same things, and each had a sizable segment of commenters disagreeing. Some will say doing it breaks the Back button; others will counter that not doing so forces readers to lose their place in an article when they click a link that references something.

To make a real-world parallel, opening external links in new tabs is like leaving the book you’re currently reading open while you grab another to check a source, or open a dictionary to look up the word. You wouldn’t normally close your current book just to do those things.

I ran an informal survey on Twitter yesterday; most people responded that they prefer external links to open in new tabs: https://twitter.com/TomFrankly/status/721775868159242240

Yes, people can middle-click or change their browser settings. Many won’t, though – especially when they’re used to big sites like Facebook, YouTube, etc opening external links in new tabs by default.

That isn’t to say that I’m in favor of letting big websites and social networks have the final say in establishing paradigms. I just want to establish that the idea that this model is an unjustified “anti-pattern” is an opinion, and it’s not universally held.

Website publishers should be free to choose whether or not they want to to use it – especially when many users prefer it. The previous versions of WordPress gave publishers that choice in a perfectly reasonable way.

Glad to know other people are frustrated by this. I’ve always utilized the convention of opening internal links in the same tab and external links in a new one. Many, many sites do this (Facebook and YouTube are just two examples), and I’ve never heard an assertion that it’s a spammy practice.

I may just start bringing my articles into Sublime Text and manually pasting the target=”_blank” attribute onto all external links until the developers fix this. Definitely not ideal, but still more efficient than adding an extra click to the link process for 90% of my links!

Wouldn’t that force every comment into the moderation queue? I’d like legitimate comments to be approved automatically as they normally are.

Here’s one of the comments that was approved but marked as spam by Akismet: 2cd89af16bc7dd4a3d760d5ffcc9806c

That setting is unchecked for me.

Thanks!

Thanks Max!

SweetPweb,

Here’s my version of the JS file: https://pastie.org/9492063

Note that you’ll need to change the ID in Line 15 to whatever element you want to target on your own site. You’ll also need to compress this code down in to a minified JS file and replace the current one in the plugin. I used this tool: https://jscompress.com/

You can see my modded plugin in action here: https://collegeinfogeek.com/morning-routine/

Max – the plugin is open source, right? Is it alright to post a Github gist of my version of the file?

I think that, plus disabling a few other JS plugins that may have been conflicting, might have fixed it! Seems to be working now. Thanks!

Btw, I made a small mod to the plugin that uses the offset of my site’s footer to define the margin-bottom instead of the bottom of the document. Might be a cool idea for a future update, since some responsive sites have footers that change height at different page widths.

If you think it’s a good idea, I can send you the code ??

Denis,

I actually played around a bit and figured out how to change it so I can leave a short message for new commenters letting them know how to connect with me on Twitter. I actually like how it turned out!

I think either method would be fine. Being able to turn the message on/off would be very simple; blog authors could turn it on if they want to post a dummy comment for testing purposes, and then turn it off so actual commenters don’t have to see it.

Gotcha. That kinda sucks – I know Google’s just trying to make the web better, but getting rid of my title and replacing it with the URL (sometimes it’s listed as just “personal-website”) isn’t helping.

Thanks so much! The scrolling is working now. However, the loading image and text don’t show up at the bottom of the page. Do you know how I could fix this?

This is actually a premium theme from ThemeForest called Boulevard. I’ve hacked it up pretty good though.