Adding links and writing the comment

A link in Issue Mint is three things: a URL, a title, and your comment on it. The comment is the part people stay subscribed for, and it is the one part nothing else can supply.

Add a link with the Add link button on any section, or from the library panel if you saved it earlier in the week. Both end up in the same place.

Paste the URL and Issue Mint reads the page

Paste a URL and press Fetch, or move on to the next field and the lookup happens on its own. Issue Mint reads the page and fills in its title and its own description, so most links need editing rather than typing.

The read is deliberately bounded: five seconds, a megabyte, and at most three redirects, each one checked before it is followed. Nothing about a link depends on that read succeeding. If the page cannot be read you get a sentence saying so, and the URL you pasted stays in the field.

What each field accepts

• Link. An http or https address, up to 2,048 characters. Nothing else is accepted, which rules out mailto: and javascript: links by construction.
• Title. Up to 250 characters. It can be left empty, and the composer shows an untitled link as such so you notice before you send.
• Your comment. Up to 5,000 characters of markdown.

The comment is the thing people read

The comment renders under the title in the email, on the archive page and in the plain text part, and Issue Mint never rewrites it. The prefill is a starting point that came off the page itself; a curator’s take is the reason a roundup is worth opening and it should sound like you wrote it, because you did.

Markdown works here the same way it does in the intro: emphasis, links, lists and quotes, with raw HTML escaped. A link inside a comment is tracked like the link it sits under, and it survives into the plain text part with its destination intact.

Marking a link sponsored

Every link carries a “Mark as sponsored” checkbox, on the form that adds it and on the form that edits it. Ticking it labels the item as sponsored in all three places an issue appears, and unticking it takes the label off.

That checkbox is the whole mechanism. There is one kind of item in an issue and a flag on it, rather than a library of block types to choose between, so a barter deal or something sold off the platform is the same checkbox as a booking taken through the sponsorship inventory. Bookings, artwork and labelling are on sponsored items.

Dragging links into order

Drag a link by the handle on its left to move it up or down inside its section, or across into another one. A drag starts after a few pixels of movement, so a stray click on the handle does not reshuffle anything.

The handles work from the keyboard too: focus one and use the arrow keys. After each drop the composer sends the whole arrangement rather than a single move, and the order you leave the issue in is the order the email, the website and the plain text part all use. Which sections exist, and what happens to an empty one, is on sections.

Editing and removing a link

Press Edit on a link to change its title, its comment or its sponsored flag, then Save link. Link edits are not autosaved, unlike the issue’s own subject and intro, so Discard changes really does discard them.

The bin icon removes the link from the issue. It does not put the library item it came from back in your inbox, and it does not touch the page it pointed at. On an issue that has already been sent, neither button is there: a sent issue is frozen because part of your list already has it.