Community Standards Question

[Lady Renae]

We know editorializing is bad as far as submissions goes. We also know context is important. We have also as a community decided that part of maintaining context is maintaining formatting as best we can and not removing things from the quote that are important to it.

With all that in mind, I have a question for you all on something I've run into in PubAd. If the source of a quote has a bunch of links within the material to be quoted, how would you guys prefer it be handled?

The way it's handled at the moment is the person just leaves out the links and doesn't even mention that there were any, which makes sense for things where there's only one link or somesuch and the url for the link is the text of the link. However, what about when it's chock full of links, the links are on words like "here" which then makes the link important so you can know what they're talking about, or other such scenarios?

The thoughts I've had were to insert the links, which could be a little too time-consuming, or to insert a note saying links were removed for submissions. None of the above quite feels right to me, but I figured I'd at least share what I'd come up with.

What do you guys think? Would you feel there was context missing if the links were left out or you weren't told there were links to be had, or is this pretty much something that doesn't matter to you?


There were a couple quotes in PubAd that I ran into today that prompted me to ask this question, and if they make it through to the mainpage I'll link them here. At the moment I'm just gathering data.

[malicious_bloke]

As long as a link to the quote in its original location is provided, transferring all the hyperlinks across isn't really necessary IMO

[Undecided]

Ditto. It is hard to imagine a situation where inline links would be so significant to the character of the quote as to compel their inclusion in the submission...

...unless the overuse or misuse of links in the quote adds to its incomprehensibility and absurdity. However, I think that such a situation is rare enough as to be ignored.

As a compromise, perhaps one might have a way to flag a quote if the original presentation enriches its understanding?

[Dragon Zachski]

I'd say that some mention of "there are links in the body of the original text" or something along those lines would be best.