Suggestion: Add Hover Previews to Links

[fewwan]

Hi everyone,

I’m new to the forum, so I apologize in advance if this isn’t the right place to post this. I tried searching to see if this has already been suggested, but didn’t find anything—sorry if I missed it!

I think it would be awesome if the Coppermind Wiki had hover previews for links, like Wikipedia does. With this feature, you could see a quick summary or the meaning of a term just by hovering over the link, without needing to open the full page.

I found out that MediaWiki has a feature called Extension:Popups that can enable this. It seems like it could be a great addition to improve navigation and make exploring the wiki more user-friendly.

What do you all think? Would this be possible to add?

Thanks for considering, and again, apologies if this is the wrong place to post!

[Starwatcher]

Hi! No worries, you're definitely in the right place!

This is something that we've talked about wanting to enable before. Unfortunately, the previews load the current text of the page even if you have the Time Machine active, so if someone who's using the Time Machine hovers on a link, they could potentially got spoiled for a later book. That would need to be resolved before we could enable the previews, so it's dependent on us having developer time for that (translation: we can't make any forecast about when it might happen). There may also be other issues; for instance, when we've tested out enabling them before, page images didn't load in the preview--that's probably not a hard blocker, but it could be related to larger problem we haven't seen yet.

So, short answer, yes this is something we'd like to do, but we can't make any promises about if/when it'll happen.

[fewwan]

Hi

Thanks so much for the detailed response! I completely understand the concerns with the Time Machine feature and the potential for spoilers—that’s definitely a big consideration.

Since this might take some time to implement natively on the Coppermind, I’ve been thinking about the idea of creating a Chrome/Firefox extension that could add this hover preview feature to any MediaWiki-based page. However, I don’t have the time to work on it at the moment, so it’s just an idea for now.

If I do find time to work on it in the future, I’ll be sure to post an update in this thread.

Thanks again for all the hard work you and the team put into making the Coppermind such a fantastic resource!