Thudlow: That’s my take. The auto-backlink is the problem because it appears in the non-pit thread. And vBulletin didn’t do that, so this wasn’t an issue back in Ye Olden Tymes. ISTM that the backlink indirection proposed in this thread doesn’t really solve the problem. It’s a technological solution to a non-technological problem. Here’s what I mean by that:
Imagine we have an e.g. ATMB thread titled “Indirection Thread for Posting about Trolling Trolls and their Trolltasic Asshattery.” So now you post a ref to the putative trolling wherever it is into the indirection thread and then post in the real Pit thread a bitch about said troll including a ref to your indirection post.
The result of this rigmarole is the putative trolling post in whatever category now contains a backlink to “ATMB: Indirection Thread for Posting about Trolling Trolls and their Trolltasic Asshattery”. Guess what: you just accused said poster of trollery in a non-pit thread. That’s a rule violation.
Now let’s change the title of the ATMB indirection thread from my deliberately over-the-top example to the utterly value-neutral “Indirection Thread”.
After about the 4th time any poster uses that thread for its intended purpose, safely making a rules-compliant accusation of trollery, everybody who’s paying attention will know exactly the meaning of a backlink to that thread appearing attached to any post anywhere: namely, that it’s an accusation of trolling. Whispered, not shouted, but completely explicit within the in-group vocabulary of SDMB.
One solution is to change the rule to accommodate the reality of the auto-backlinks, and exempt them, and only them, from being seen as an accusation. Were it possible for mods to selectively delete backlinks, or for Discourse to be tweaked to skip providing auto-backlinks to e.g. any thread in the Pit, we might be able to leave the rule as it stands. But I’m not that happy with that set of possible solutions: too hard or too impossible.
My bottom line:
As it stands, the only way to comply with the rule is to not provide a live link to the offending post. As said upthread, there are ways to provide a non-live link, most easily by enclosing it in backticks like e.g.:
`https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linking-a-pit-post-about-trolling-to-another-thread/1003059/23\`
which renders as
https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linking-a-pit-post-about-trolling-to-another-thread/1003059/23
and does not trigger a back-link.
My view of the least bad solution is to
- Leave Discourse functionality as-is.
- Expect and enforce that Pit accusations of trolling include a dead link, not a live one, directly to the offending post, not to the OP of the thread.
- Pit mods to enforce that gently by breaking (via backticks) such forward links when they occur with a “no harm no foul but don’t do it again.” note to the offending pitter. Which will remove the auto-backlink, at least from that time forward.
- And of course any pitter who conveniently “forgets” on a regular basis to deaden their links can be dealt with (read “be hammered”) under the “Don’t repeatedly disobey mod instructions” rule.
There’s a fairly small circle of posters who perform the troll police function by posting Pit complaints about said trolls. They/we/I ought to be able to pick up this dead link habit pretty quickly.
IMO YMMV, etc.