The forum is spamming me with "earned popular link"

Community Website and Forum
4

There are a series of badges awarded based on how many people clicked a given external link in one of your posts:

As far as I can see, there aren't any badges based on the number of references to a post by forum members. However, there are a series based on how many incoming unique visitors there have been following a link you shared externally. This is why you will notice the forum adds your user name as a u parameter on copied post URLs like this:

https://forum.arduino.cc/t/the-forum-is-spamming-me-with-earned-popular-link/986618/3?u=in0

I like the more granular feedback I get from the Discourse-based forum. The "karma" count provided by the old SMF based forum was a vague metric of how helpful the community found your contributions, but there was no way to know which specific contributions were more appreciated than others.

With Discourse, I can see exactly which posts the metrics apply to and perhaps try to identify what I did right there so that I might do more of it in the future.

I do wonder though whether some of these click counts are based more on bot activity than on real humans clicking the links. The thing that made me suspicious is sometimes I will see that the click counts are very close on multiple links on a post I made, even though one link was directly related to the primary subject of discussion, while another was added simply to provide a convenient reference in case someone was not familiar with the term I used. I would expect the former type of link to have a higher click count relative to the latter type.