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When linking to an SO answer, I sometimes leave out the question ID if I'm trying to conserve space in a comment (i.e. http://stackoverflow.com/q/answer-id instead of http://stackoverflow.com/q/question-id/name/answer-id#answer-id), since SO will redirect to the long URL anyway

SO will pick up on the short link and try to add it to the Linked box, but it doesn't figure out the question name properly, so the link ends up with no text and is invisible in the box. For example, on this question I left a comment with several truncated links as described above, so while the Linked box only shows one link:

Screenshot of the linked box with one link

the HTML actually has four links:

<div class="linked"> 
<div class="spacer"> 
<a href="/questions/29303/enthusiast-fanatic-badge-do-we-need-to-just-visit-or-participate" class="question-hyperlink">Enthusiast/Fanatic Badge - Do We Need to Just Visit or Participate?</a> 
</div> 
<div class="spacer"> 
<a href="/questions/29304/" class="question-hyperlink"></a> 
</div> 
<div class="spacer"> 
<a href="/questions/24887/" class="question-hyperlink"></a> 
</div> 
<div class="spacer"> 
<a href="/questions/21900/" class="question-hyperlink"></a> 
</div> 
</div>
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  • I'm pretty sure this behaviour has changed.
    – TRiG
    Mar 2, 2013 at 0:55

1 Answer 1

1

This is an unsupported syntax (short links to answers), so this behavior is by design from my perspective.

/q/{question id}

is the only supported syntax.

You don't link to questions to other answers -- you link questions to other questions.

(I'll change it so these links are ignored unless they point to an actual question)

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