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Currently new users are limited to one two links in a post. If the purpose of this is, as I suspect, to prevent spam, I think it would be safe to allow unlimited internal links (i.e. links to M?S[OFU] posts). It would be nice to do this on MSO at least, so that users can post links to examples of their problems.

Note: I know that MSO users can get unlimited links simply by linking to their S[OFU] account. Usually someone has to tell them this though; it isn't necessarily clear.

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  • Should this be tagged with [internal-links]?
    – Stevoisiak
    Commented Jul 21, 2017 at 15:55

4 Answers 4

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Why would you need to post more than one two links to explain your problem?

It seems to me that one two links, while strict, should be sufficient.

Edit: only sites outside our network (see footer) will count towards this hyperlink limit.

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  • 5
    The most common scenario is when users ask (complain) about specific questions (users) on SO/SF/SU and want to provide links to said questions.
    – ChssPly76
    Commented Dec 17, 2009 at 0:13
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    Why would you need to restrict it? Who's gonna spam-promote SO... on MSO?
    – Shog9
    Commented Dec 17, 2009 at 1:49
  • well this suggestion was inspired by this post: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/33176/… OP said in a comment on my answer that he didn't have the rep to include more than one link
    – Kip
    Commented Dec 17, 2009 at 3:48
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    This happens rather often. When users want to notify the community about others who seem to exhibit strange behavior, they come to meta and link to the offending questions, if they can. If they can't add more than one link, high rep users have to come and edit the post with those links.
    – alex
    Commented Dec 17, 2009 at 7:41
  • that user didn't even bother to associate his accounts. I manually associated them (a one-click affair, since he used a named openid) and he instantly got 300+ rep (from old unassociated questions).
    – Jeff Atwood
    Commented Dec 17, 2009 at 8:05
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    I was in this situation on Superuser. As a new user on all 4 sites I had linked my accounts but still had low rep. I was trying to show my work and wanted to link to 3 questions to say, "I've looked at these and they are not what I am trying to do."
    – user145081
    Commented Mar 24, 2010 at 22:12
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    Currently I'm trying to post my first question on SO, which is basically "I'm having trouble building this source code <link> using these instructions <link>" and can't because of of the external link limit. I can understand wanting to stop spammers, but if a spammer can make an account and get past a captcha, does it really matter whether they post one link, or two, or ten?
    – Nathan Craike
    Commented Jan 19, 2011 at 8:33
  • Realistically, they can just visit any page they want and spam everywhere they want :(
    – Kent Fredric
    Commented Feb 15, 2011 at 21:56
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New users on any of the SOFU sites can post as many links as they like. See the little gray "add comment" link below your post? Click it, and add any links that won't fit into your post there.

It does take some thought to come up with that workaround without any prior hints, but I'm willing to bet a month's salary that I'm not the first to figure out that particular trick.

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  • 3
    for a bonus badge, edit your post to include said links once you've gotten enough rep to post multiple links.
    – quack quixote
    Commented Feb 15, 2010 at 3:46
  • I just put my second comment in a code tag and someone was nice enough to come re-edit my post and turn it into a link for me.
    – Dan
    Commented Apr 6, 2010 at 2:03
  • Brand spanking new users can add comments now? Since when?
    – SamB
    Commented Feb 13, 2012 at 23:34
  • New users can comment on their own questions and on their own answers.
    – Damian Yerrick
    Commented Nov 18, 2014 at 1:34
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Perhaps new users on meta should be pointed to how to link their accounts? Or alternatively, if their OpenID already exists on one of the other sites, they are invited to link them right at registration time?

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    " "if their OpenID already exists on one of the other sites, they are invited to link them right at registration time?" this already happens, try it and see...
    – Jeff Atwood
    Commented Dec 16, 2009 at 23:00
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I posted a truly duplicate post with essentially the same information, and question. I wanted to drop it here too, because this is the official thread.

I'm interested to know what does SO get out of restricting the amount of wikilinks I can place in my question or answer to other answers on the same site. I mean, seriously... Is there a single benefit? It seems entirely arbitrary. Why not limit the amount of characters my post can take? Wouldn't it be much more common to make a post annoyingly long, than annoying over-linked. And, what about formatting -- I've never hit a limit that said I had too many characters that were bold, or italic -- and certainly those are more annoying when abused than links... Same, can be said for CAPITAL LETTERS.

I'm just not sure if these limits are in place to annoy the user enough to want to get past them, or if they serve some other more silly function? Maybe, the reason is a hardware limitation. Even wikipedia allows new users to create articles with an unlimited amount of wikilinks; and, I should add, Yahoo! answers doesn't have any of these silly limits.

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    Sure, you can downvote this, but thanks to the "tireless efforts of fine community members like [Evan Carroll]" (Atwood 2010) this limit has been removed and now people can post as many internal links as they would like.
    – Evan Carroll
    Commented May 8, 2010 at 15:45

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