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On this answer on out meta, Hendrik said we should make malicious sites link not clickable and add a warning. I totally agree with that.

So my question is multi-part:

  • Do we have a canonical way of doing this (as an example, I codified the link in this question : Why is my debugger detected as a Trojan by anti-virus software?)
  • Is there an automatic way to do it (like by flagging?) I don't think I ever saw this.
  • Could we request for a specific markdown markup for this kind of links ? This link would send the users to a confirmation page stating that "This link has been marked as malicious, be advise to be careful blah blah... {I accept} / {take me back}"
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    If anyone has a better view of how many times this would get used? Maybe it's not worth it.
    – M'vy
    Mar 3 '15 at 15:33
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    Personally, I always edit the links with hxxp://badlink.com (notice the two 'x's). This helps researchers still use the link but prevents an accidental click. The main issue is that new people (demographic likely to post an unfiltered 'bad' link), are simply not usually going to know a particular markdown for it... That said, you could potentially create a smart filter similar to Outlook's popup, "it looks like you forgot an attachment, do you still want to send?" where programmatically, we can attempt to suggest the markdown based on keywords within the post (and of course a link).
    – Matthew Peters
    Mar 4 '15 at 22:06
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    @MatthewPeters I was thinking of having a shortcut in the toolbar. Sci-Fy has that thing for spoilers that seems to work.
    – M'vy
    Mar 5 '15 at 8:01
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Codifying it or removing it is the way forward, depending on context. It certainly shouldn't be clickable.

There are no automated systems in place to do this.

Your proposal seems like improving usability for something that shouldn't have easily accessible usability. Every other site in the SE network is going to actively edit malicious links out so this would be functionality specific for Information Security. With the amount of times a malicious link is legitimately left in a post I would think that just codifying them should do.

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Do we have a canonical way of doing this (as an example, I codified the link in this question : Why is Ollydbg detected as trojan by anti-virus software?)

Seems like a good way to me. Though I'm not convinced whether it's warranted: the context already makes it apparent that the link is to potentially malicious content, and merely clicking on a link should not cause problems anyway. Ok, so people click by mistake and browsers are buggy, so it's not a bad idea to make the link harder to click.

Is there an automatic way to do it (like by flagging?) I don't think I ever saw this.

Click on the “edit” button below the post.

Could we request for a specific markdown markup for this kind of links ? This link would send the users to a confirmation page stating that "This link has been marked as malicious, be advise to be careful blah blah... {I accept} / {take me back}"

No, and no. Most links to malicious content should be removed. Only a few links to malicious content are useful to have, it's not worth creating a site feature for this. An interstitial page is completely useless anyway, users would just click through (I clicked on that link, why are you asking me to confirm what I just did?).

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