Possible improvement to user experience on help page

Question 1

While I've been a member for a long time, I have only asked 1 question and that was a long time ago. I decided to review the guidelines in the help pages before I ask a new question.

I was looking at the What is on topic page and I saw many links to outside websites. The problem I see with user experience is that these links open in the current tab or window rather than opening a new tab, which ends up taking the user off the Stack Exchange Software engineering website.

Would it be possible to change these links so that the open in a new tab or window? This would keep the user on our site instead of redirecting them elsewhere.

Question 2

Why can't you middle click or right click and open in new window/tab? The behavior of opening in the same tab is consistent across not only the Help Center pages, but links in questions and answers. This feature request would probably be better for Meta Stack Exchange, since it affects every site in the network and possibly multiple features, but I think it'll need stronger rationale to be considered and accepted.

Question 3

Alternatively, if it did open in a new window, there are some other folks who would prefer it didn't. Which is just to say, it's a hard problem where different users prefer different things.

Ultimately, using the default browser behavior tries to toe the line by allowing users to make the choice as to how/where they'd prefer to open the link. And that decision is something we've tried to align with in the past as in these previous answers:

Aside: Just as a matter of procedure, I agree this question is probably better suited for Meta Stack Exchange since it's network wide behavior, but I'm also likely to leave the same status-bydesign message there, so there's no need to raise it again or shuffle it either. No harm raising here, just also calling out the scope.

KyleMit StaffMod 1134 bronze badges · Accepted Answer · 2025-11-05 15:06:47Z

Alternatively, if it did open in a new window, there are some other folks who would prefer it didn't. Which is just to say, it's a hard problem where different users prefer different things.

Ultimately, using the default browser behavior tries to toe the line by allowing users to make the choice as to how/where they'd prefer to open the link. And that decision is something we've tried to align with in the past as in these previous answers:

Aside: Just as a matter of procedure, I agree this question is probably better suited for Meta Stack Exchange since it's network wide behavior, but I'm also likely to leave the same status-bydesign message there, so there's no need to raise it again or shuffle it either. No harm raising here, just also calling out the scope.

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