Email links point to the old topic when merged

Similarly, I noticed yesterday that I had to edit Privacy expectations when mapping points of interest to fix a link to a post that had gotten moved to a different topic. It wound up looking like a plain-text link and pointing to a very different message in the original topic.

Faced with the broken link, I couldn’t recall which post I had linked to, so had to use the Wayback Machine to find it again. I got pretty lucky; the Wayback Machine doesn’t normally index single-page applications like Discourse very well.

A redirect would be nice, as would a notification that the post you’ve linked to has been moved. But a permalink URL is poorly coupled to the original post – it ends in the post’s index within the topic, which isn’t stable in cases like this. So I suspect Discourse would be unable to keep close track of inbound links.

I’m unsure if quoting the intended post would’ve avoided breakage in my case. The quotation syntax would still refer to a post index, but it would also contain the quoted text.

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