9

There's a magic link I use all the time: [help/on-topic]. If you didn't know it, when posted in a comment, it renders as help center - which is great!

Except for one thing: from a UX perspective, it's wrong.

"Help Center" sounds really daunting. Not something I want to click and browse for hours. "Help Center" is basically a sub-site, with a TON of information, including a page that explains what is and what isn't on-topic on the site.

When I link to [help/on-topic], I'm posting a (often canned) comment that tells the OP why I'm hammering their question, and kindly invite them to read up the site rules.

Of course, the site rules are in the help center. But I'm not linking to the entire help center and telling the OP to read the whole entire darn thing, I'm linking to one specific page that contains the specifically relevant information.

But the link doesn't render as What topics can I ask about here? as the actual page title says - it renders as "help center", which is terribly vague and misleading.

Can the rendering of the [help/on-topic] magic link be changed to "What topics can I ask about here?"

[What topics can I ask about here?](http://site.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic)

Also.. are there any stats about how often the OP actually clicks these links? 50%? 10%? 1%? 0.0001%? If so, it would be interesting to compare before/after implementing this feature request.

Improve this question
5
  • Related: Make magic link descriptions less ambiguous
    – Mathieu Guindon
    Commented Jan 17, 2017 at 17:38
  • I generally preface those links like this: "please review the site scope in the help center"
    – ale
    Commented Jan 17, 2017 at 17:43
  • @ale aye, I postfix them with "page" e.g. "please see our help center page blablabla" - point is, if the link itself looks like it's taking you to some "help center" where you're going to have to dig up the relevant information, it's much less likely to result with the OP clicking that link IMO.
    – Mathieu Guindon
    Commented Jan 17, 2017 at 17:45
  • 3
    As a practical tip, you can leave out the protocol and hostname from within-site link URLs. Writing please review our [site scope](/help/on-topic) renders as "please review our site scope", and is nearly as short as using the magic link syntax.
    – Ilmari Karonen
    Commented Jan 18, 2017 at 6:22
  • 2
    This is why I never use the article-specific magic links and craft them manually every time. Fixing this would be great.
    – SevenSidedDie
    Commented Jan 18, 2017 at 17:52

0

Reset to default

You must log in to answer this question.