You probably know links as websites. We are now reverting back to calling them links—partly to avoid confusion with work group sites and content sites, and partly to emphasise that these can be links to pages rather than “websites”. A website like www.nytimes.com is different to a link to a specific page on that website. In most cases, a link to a specific page will help students get straight to the information they need.

Here's a preview of what will change on the admin form:

As with news, all categories will collapse into topics. All the existing categories for links will be converted to topics for you automatically.

Unlike news, there are no drafts with links—they’ll become visible to students as soon as you add them. That makes it easier to add links quickly, and drafts are unnecessary for links, which don't require the same care and attention that goes into news.

We've also done away with pre-publication and expiry dates for links. Removing expiry dates was controversial with news, and we've gone even further this time—so this time I'll go into a bit more detail about these decisions.

No expiry date: as with news, recent links will be more prominent to students than older ones, so they're more likely to be clicked on. Older links might be just as useful 5 years after they were added—I know this one is, to me.

Another reason: as an admin, having to decide when a link will expire when you're adding it is asking too much, and it diverts concentration away from the task of adding the link. Using myself as the usability sample group, I imagine my thought process going something like this:

1. That's a great article on interview tips! I want to add a link to that.
2. Admin > Links > add a link
3. Title: easy.
   URL: paste that in.
   Expire:.... uh.... should I check when was it written? It seemed pretty timeless advice. But it won't be as relevant when robots have taken over all our jobs. So that will probably be, like... uh... the year 2050? Close enough. Oh wait, I have to predict not just the year, but the exact date?! I'd better do some research on Wikipedia...

It was a similar decision for future publication dates—they're gone too. In this case though, we can see that only 0.5% of links are set to be published at a later date*, so hopefully this isn't as contentious for links as it was for news.

Currently, you can add info sheets (sometimes known as articles, tips, fact sheets, resources or some variation on these) which are either uploaded documents or links. So there's an overlap between info sheets and links, and it would be easy to get see info sheets as a sort of sub-category of links, which they're not.

We'll be clearing up this ambiguity with this update. You might find some of your info sheets have been converted to links (they'll be put into an “info sheet” topic for you), and it will no longer be possible to add an info sheet which is just a link—you'd just add a link instead.