Two link limit per post

I think the key word in that sentence is new. The limit will no doubt be lifted once the user has a small amount of reputation… In other words it is, as you obviously realised, an anti-spam measure.

I confirm, this an anti-spam feature of Discourse that gets lifted after some activity.

The default anti-spam features are very efficient and nicely designed.

And invisible to real normal users.

Yes, as others have shared, this is a default anti-spam feature. We can tweak it to increase the number of links if we see it’s problematic for users.

I can assure you that I am very real

Thanks for setting this up; perhaps you could make a very limited list (specifically *.openstreetmap.org) of exceptions that would always be allowed as described at Nofollow link settings - admins - Discourse Meta

Good idea, I’ve changed the settings to:

imagen1530×450 29.7 KB

@Stereo would this solve your request/concerns?

For what it’s worth, this does not match subdomains. Does `allowed link domains` include subdomains? - #3 by simon - support - Discourse Meta

Oh well … that’s a little tedious because there are quite a few of these. This seems to be the most complete list:
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Domain_names

The wiki itself already uses a similar whitelist which has a few other popular domains from the OSM ecosystem.

Could a thread be opened to list the areas of local chapters that need to be allowed. Only stable and regularly used mapping tools or backgrounds.
But you can also add Mapillary domain for example.

Do we expect a freshly new user here will need to post a lot of links in their initial messages? Note that once you are a regular user you don’t have this restriction.

Why not let the default Discourse settings and adjust if realy needed after some normal use of this forum ?

It is unusual to post several links in your first messages, and this anti-spam feature is quite useful. If you make it more permissive, you may have to deal with bots.

On OSM France forum we had a lot of bots on our old phpBB. Since we switch to Discourse, its default anti-bot/spam builtin features reduced this management to zero.
After one year, nobody complained with the limits and understood them.

In the forum, probably not. In the Q&A, we would really like people to put as many links as possible ! Maybe the whitelisting will be sufficient, if expanded to a few “supported” services, like uMap intances, routers, overpass-turbo, etc.

OSM Wiki and od course OSM itself also should be whitelisted.

The “normal” questioner on the help site is new rather than a returning user.

Please, allow Geofabrik, it is really useful website:

www.geofabrik.de
download.geofabrik.de
taginfo.geofabrik.de

This is a good example of a post that would have been better with 3 links. I think this shows that this issue is not solved yet, so I’ve removed the “solution” mark on @nukeador’s earlier answer, especially seeing how not even the “www” subdomain of openstreetmap.org appears to be permitted at the moment.

If we’re not willing to increase the link limit, we should at least expand the list of “allowed link domains”. In my opinion, it should include at least the our own domains and commonly linked sites such as those in the wiki captcha whitelist.

I know it’s tedious and would prefer if Discourse allowed wildcards for subdomains. (Is there already an issue for that somewhere?) I’d do the manual work myself, but I don’t have those privileges.

@Firefishy what’s your recommendation on this one? For me seems like a technical decision on security settings.

I have greatly increased the list of allowed sites.

The list either doesn’t work as intended or needs to be expanded to include the OSM wiki. There’s a recent example of an user having to split a post containing 3 wiki links.