Add syntax to force hide URL preview for a link you're posting

[n-o-o-b]

Discord has a feature where you can put < > around a link you're posting and it won't show the preview. It would be cool to have a similar feature in Riot.

[JaniM]

Force is a strong word. I think this'd be a useful feature, if we changed it to hint. Let the sender hint that a link might not need a preview (useful if you're sending a bunch of links, for example), but also add a button for expanding the previews if the recipient wants to do so.

[t3chguy]

Echoing Lampholder:

I found myself wishing for this recently - the GDPR message text from the server notice room is particularly noisy with the URL previews.

Talking it through with @lukebarnard1 we concluded that perhaps this could be implemented (on the rendering side) by adding a custom attribute to the HTML of the link in the formattedBody, something like data-mx-preview=false.

This would allow any clients who submit a formatted body to supress the preview - the question then is how to provide the UX for this. Something like discord's could work, but it doesn't play very nicely with established markdown conventions.

[t3chguy]

(bumping prio as per other issue)

[t3chguy]

One question remains, is it acceptable that there'll be no way with plaintext (just body) to mark a URL as unwanting of a preview?

[ara4n]

mixins would be a nice way to solve this :(

[t3chguy]

Would they though? You'd need a weird map[url]bool mixin to be able to specify per url in the event

[ara4n]

yeah, it wouldn't help per-url, but would help per event.

[t3chguy]

this issue seems to be targeted per-url :(

[Wendell250]

Was this implemented at some point?
If a URL is encased in backticks it will hide the preview, e.g.: `https://matrix.org`

Or is this purely client-sided while still making a query on backend?

[MadLittleMods]

@Wendell250's solution seems pretty viable. I'm tempted to close this until someone really wants normal styled links without a preview.

The other unsolved case is when you use inline link syntax which also triggers a preview [do some search](https://www.bing.com/)

[urmaul]

Building a matrix bot that sends HTML messages. This feature would let me put many not-important-but-still-useful links there.