Do not show X in Unlinked mentions / Avoid backlinks detection in tags, wikilinks and md links

I agree that we should leave to the user’s discretion what to link. Excluding unlinked mentions by some default rules may confuse users. But I also agree that too many useless unlinked mentions will prevent users from finding useful hints. So I think it would be a good idea to provide a way to manually exclude certain unlinked mention. For example, add an Exclude button next to Link button to exclude specify unlinked mention.

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as a Software developer I’m really suffer from this when use unlinked mention, many of code blocks shows and i can’t even know if it’s a code block or not,
imagine you have more then 100 words all of theme in code block
This is a simple example of what I’m struggling with as I can’t tell if the word is inside a code block unless I click on show more context for each one of them

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I understand that you guys (the devs) want to leave this to user discretion as it is not possible to figure out what everyone wants and it might be difficult to decide whether or not something qualifies a valid suggestion or not.

However, as expressed in the first post and in many other answers in this thread, I think URLs are a no brainer. If a word that matches a link to a note is found within an URL, linking from it would defeat the purpose of having the URL in the note in the first place.

Why would anyone add an external URL into a note? Because they want to be able to link to somewhere outside Obsidian. Why would you link a portion of a URL to an internal note? It serves no purpose as adding it would break the single use case of adding an url to a note. If by mistake someone clicks to link the wrong suggestion (which is not that hard depending on the theme you are using) that original URL is not unusable as it is not even recognized as an external link and clicking it won’t take you out of Obsidian.

Can we please ignore, at least, URLs for the unlinked mentions suggestion? I love the unlinked mentions pane as it is one of the best ways of discovering connections but sometimes it is just unusable. I wanted to have a note for readwise where I add things I learn about it and have an overview of the notes I still need to process… try searching for mentions to Readwise in a vault full of readwise URLS…

5 Likes

A Use Case to some already mentioned topics with screenshots, to describe the issue from my point of view.

Use Case

  • I prefer linking notes with other related notes.
  • I love the linking feature from obsidian!
    • I can find related topics really fast.
    • I can generate new ideas based on my notes and especially by their relations.
  • I use the “Unlinked Mentions Suggestion (Tab)” to link old & new notes for that.

The Annoying & Destructive Part

If you have a bigger list of suggestions, this is really time-consuming to evaluate and decide, what is relevant to a note and what might be a falsely suggestion based on a link/url (a markdown URL alias or a URL part of this markdown).

Destructive Usage

In the worst case, you click on the suggestion and destroy a working URL.

Worst Case Sample (Url/Path)

Screenshot - 2023-02-02 23.44.38

Worst Case Sample (Alias)

Screenshot - 2023-02-02 23.45.25

1 Like

I was just redirected here. I accidentally reposted this having made a feature request. Matches in URLs is a bug. If I accidentally make a change, the url is broken.

In the case of inside a [[Markdown Link]] - it would seem to break the link if allow to happen.

Consider making this an option?

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I have a related concern that I think might be safe to always ignore in the parser: I’m getting suggestions for linking notes in the language tag in a code block. Like so:

image

As others here, I happen to have a note named “Alloy”. This happens to me with “Dataview” too. In both of those cases, I don’t think there’s ever a reason to change the language tag to [[Alloy]] or [[dataview]].

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In the original post of this thread, the item “Matches in substring of an alredy linked note” is struck out. Is this supposed to have been implemented somehow, or was it just ruled out as a suggestion?

Like @xavdid, I often I wish I wasn’t shown a bunch more unlinked mentions after linking the first mention on a page.

For my purposes, it would be help if there were simply an icon or flag added to pages under Unlinked Mentions that are also in Linked Mentions. Even better, list them in a third collapsible section – called “Additional Mentions” or similar.

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I’m sure there will be some open feature request, but I haven’t found it. I apologize for the possible noise generated.

Use case or problem

The question is to avoid backlinks detection in tags, wikilinks and md links in “unlinked” backlink section, just like in the picture. It cause a lot of noise and, unless I am not missing something, it seems useless to me…

image

image

Proposed solution

Skip backlink detection results from wikilinks and md links…

I understand but… why suggest something that generates an error? It seems to me to give the possibility to choose something that nobody will ever choose…

because it’s computationally expensive to check.

Ok, this is a very good reason!

Use case or problem

As a programmer, I have code blocks where I set the programming language for supporting syntax highlighting (jsx, css).

In the Outgoing links section, I noticed references for the lines ```jsx as the word exists as a file.

It’d be great to exclude them.

Captura de pantalla 2023-08-24 a las 20.33.49

Proposed solution

Ignore from linked & unlinked mentions the programming language name in code blocks

Current workaround (optional)

I asked on the Community Discord and one solution is using the Search option and ignoring a concrete pattern. It works but is not a proper solution as the unlinked mentions are still there

2 Likes