I'm not a Wikipedia user but came to it lately and saw that on hovering Wikipedia links they show a pop-over tooltip now – which is pretty cool – with an image and some short information. I think this would be useful for Stack Overflow as well to have some kind of expanded tooltip with the questions title, author, views, upvotes, shortened question, comments count, and accepted answer (if any).

IMO this would improve the user experience. Users would not longer need to load question over question in new tabs (as long as there are linked questions, but I came in this situation a few times) and could quickly view and answer or interact with it.

Here is something I put together:

enter image description here


  • quickly see if the linked question is old/new
  • who posted the question
  • which tags does the linked question have
  • is it popular
  • it shows the answer without actually following the link
  • put it on your start-list
  • up/down-vote for quick interaction (@)


Besides that this would be nice for links inside Stack Overflow, hovering over an author should also show quick information about the author without actually clicking it (same approach I would say).


Because question and answers are sometimes longer than this small space I have added in the image, I would add a hover functionality where the user can hover over the question and answer which will then expanded. If the user goes to the lower 50% with the mouse the answer will be expanded to full content height. So more text could fit in the content section.


After reading the comments here is my update. I really like the ideas other have and agree strongly to have just a preview, so no answer no up/down votes and other features that belong to the post itself not a pop-over. I have also thought about a way to show that SO links are SO links. People tend to just paste the full URL or use the wrong title in their markdown. So a simple tag could help, like the browser extension 'GitHub Issue Link Status' has it. Here is an updated preview:

enter image description here

Question I used for the preview: GROUP BY lname ORDER BY showing wrong results

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    Whats the percentage of questions on SO that contain links to other questions? – BDL Jul 8 '19 at 8:53
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    @BDL Good question, I can't give you numbers (maybe someone could query this?) but the most times I search something some people post reference/dpulicate links. – muuvmuuv Jul 8 '19 at 8:57
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    @MartijnPieters Great, haven't found that but it's 7 years old, idk if it's okay to post under it? Anyway I would disagree with the accepted answer: 1. those links could be loaded in background after the site has finished or cached (like vue/react/angular apps does routing) 2. The web isn't longer just web, people tend to like features like that to get a fast look instead of opening it in a new tab and 3. it could be opt-in/out. – muuvmuuv Jul 8 '19 at 9:00
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    FWIW, I've heard someone at Wikipedia responsible for this feature talk about it somewhere, and it was an extremely complex multi-year project across multiple disciplines from NLP to network infrastructure… Not gonna hold my breath for it on SO. ;) – deceze Jul 8 '19 at 12:29
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    What happens when you hover on a link in the popup? – Artemis Jul 8 '19 at 18:43
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    There's a SE Preview on hover userscript (tested in Tampermonkey) which does something like that. – wOxxOm Jul 8 '19 at 18:56
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    I actually hate these things. Even on Wikipedia. – Draco18s no longer trusts SE Jul 8 '19 at 20:02
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    @Draco18s Could you expound why you hate these things? – theGtknerd Jul 8 '19 at 22:26
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    @theGtknerd 1) because I only ever seem to trigger them on accident and never when I actually want it and 2) because if I trigger it on accident it can't go away fast enough and stop obscuring my view. 3) there used to be an insidious piece of malware that would turn keywords (on any site) into "links" in order to show advertisements when you hovered over the word. – Draco18s no longer trusts SE Jul 8 '19 at 23:09
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    @ArtemisFowl nothing. I would show links as text or just make them not clickable. At first it is only a preview to see if this link/question is relevant. – muuvmuuv Jul 9 '19 at 7:00
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    I'm with @Draco18s, I hate on-hover popups of all kinds and have since at least when Windows started hiding what I was looking at so it could show me tooltips with file size and such that I didn't ask for and didn't want. Every time I have to use a Windows machine, the first thing I do is turn that nonsense off. Require an affirmative action before obscuring my view. – T.J. Crowder Jul 9 '19 at 13:20
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    MacOS –> Safari –> any link –> place the cursor on it, and tap (not click) with three fingers on the mouse or touchpad. That opens a popover, and loads the website linked to, in it. Now click in the popover to move it to a fully functional new tab. Other browsers should have that feature too. Poor web, if all the websites out there must provide this functionality by themselves. – Andreas detests censorship Jul 10 '19 at 8:57
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    One more place to inject a teams link for those who don't know about teams – Kevin B Jul 15 '19 at 15:45

I don't think this is a good idea.

Popups like that would need to be quite large if you also want to show an answer. Then which answer would you show? Often enough, the accepted answer isn't the best answer.

How much of the question would you show? Long questions won't fit in a popup. How would a popup like that handle stack snippets?

One user mentions this won't have a performance impact, but I don't agree: There'd be more traffic to the server, as every time a user intends to click a link, a call will be done to the popup endpoint, resulting in a popup being rendered, even if the user just wants to navigate to the link. I doubt that impact is negligible.

Not to mention the nuisance of popups appearing when you hover over something.

This seems like way too much impact / work for little, if any, gain.

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    I agree, however the "which answer would you show?" point doesn't sound that much of a problem for me, you can link to posts directly, so show the linked post. But better not show anything, I'm still struggling adapting myself with the not so recent tag tooltips that eat all front page on hover. – Kaiido Jul 8 '19 at 11:07
  • @Kaiido: What about all the existing links that link to a question? We can't expect all of them to be updated. – Cerbrus Jul 8 '19 at 11:11
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    The tooltip could have a tooltip that shows that it might not show the best answer... – ivarni Jul 8 '19 at 11:12
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    @ivarni: We need to go deeper. – Cerbrus Jul 8 '19 at 11:12
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    Is this a new thing that we can link to posts? I was under the impression I could always do it, and that I always did it. When I linked to a question, it's because the question was relevant. – Kaiido Jul 8 '19 at 11:13
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    No, it's not new. But there are a bazillion links on SO. A large portion of them link to a question, not to a answer. – Cerbrus Jul 8 '19 at 11:14
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    A short timeout before showing it would fix a lot of the issues you bring up. I personally would show an excerpt from the question and show how many answers it has and if one was accepted but require the user to click through to the question to actually view the answers. – James Coyle Jul 8 '19 at 11:26
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    @JamesCoyle: Only the performance impact, for a part. The rest isn't fixed... I often hover links to see where they go. I don't want popups when I do that. – Cerbrus Jul 8 '19 at 11:32
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    The problem with "just seeing where the url goes to" is just a personal thing IMO and still works even with the popup appearing. Anyway SO links could be replaced with some tag like links to visually mark that those are links to SO sites, see: github.com/bfred-it/github-issue-link-status – muuvmuuv Jul 8 '19 at 12:17
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    @muuvmuuv: You're suggesting a lot of added complexity. Settings, caching, extra libraries... All that for a popup. That just doesn't seem worth the effort. – Cerbrus Jul 8 '19 at 12:39
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    "One template parser", said as if that's something insignificant. – Cerbrus Jul 8 '19 at 12:47
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    @ivarni sorry I wasn't aware of what SO uses. Seems a bit tricky then. Yes ES template strings, it's the same. Anyway this is something to discus after this is approved. – muuvmuuv Jul 8 '19 at 14:06
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    @Cerbrus Yes, but If we go that way all the time, we would not innovate new things and stop ourself by thinking "this is not possible with what we have atm". My way is all the time to say "if it is not going this way we need to rethink and change it until it works the way we want it to". Sure this means that sometimes things need to be re-build with old or new stacks but hey, programming is fun, right? (I don't want to say rebuild Stack... but someday) – muuvmuuv Jul 8 '19 at 14:20
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    "We can't expect all of them to be updated" Sure we can -- the link itself wouldn't need to be changed (that's not how the tech works), but even if it did, the Community user has already gone through almost all http links and updated them to https before. How it would be implemented is on the page markup via JS -- on hover of a link beginning https://stackoverflow.com/q/ or whatever, go grab a screenshot of XY coordinates of that page and display it in a tooltip. – TylerH Jul 8 '19 at 15:11
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    @Cerbrus No, Kaiido's comment was suggesting linking to a specific post, e.g. an answer link should show the answer. A question would just show the question. Etc. And again, the point of the preview is that it is a preview, e.g. a gist, a sample, etc. It should be just enough to see whether the link is worth clicking, not a full accounting of the contents of the link (otherwise why bother clicking through)? So it's not an issue if something like a Snippet were cut off, because seeing the snippet is not the important part. Anyway, it'd be better it ignore Snippets for preview generation. – TylerH Jul 8 '19 at 18:39

This feature is well suited for Wikipedia because articles there always start with a lead section that summarises the contents. Here, on the other hand, key information is scattered across the question and its answers, which means there is no truly satisfactory solution when it comes to deciding what to show in the popup (see also the answers by Cerbrus and Amit Joshi). As for adding scroll bars to show the whole Q&A, that would cancel out most of the usability gains of the popup. That being so, I don't think this kind of preview would work well.

  • Yeah, not even me want to have scrollbars in it haha. Anyway a preview is still a preview so just to see if this is something I want to follow. Some people read the back of the book first and some others start to read the first page before deciding if this is it. – muuvmuuv Jul 8 '19 at 12:40
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    @muuvmuuv What I think that might be a better fit for the site would be Martin's suggestion of a more minimalistic popup showing some key information about the question, as opposed to the question body itself. – duplode Jul 8 '19 at 12:46
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    I agree, Wikipedia spent a lot of time structuring content. And it's needed for the context in which they present information. We have a different audience. I would possibly suggest innovating, however. We could do a side-bar implementation which has Q & A coverage and then when you hover over each answer, you get a Wiki-like pop-up with that answer. Imagine the F1/any racing TV side bar leaderboard with the question at the top and just a vote leaderboard and a position/indicator for each answer. This would be something a website integrates into their pages as an ad or just contextual info – d4c0d312 Jul 10 '19 at 14:34
  • "[A]rticles [at Wikipedia] always start with a lead section that summarises the contents." Perhaps SO would do well to have the same. nngroup.com/articles/how-little-do-users-read – bishop Jul 10 '19 at 17:33
  • @d4c0d312 An F1-style leaderboard... Do we get to choose our three-letter abbreviations? :D (If I'm imagining it right, this does sound like a nice idea for skimming within a Q&A.) – duplode Jul 10 '19 at 20:39
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    @bishop Wouldn't that clash with the Q&A format, though? More specifically: where would we put the Q&A summaries, and who would write them? – duplode Jul 10 '19 at 20:40
  • Warning, wild spitballing. Well, kind of like Rotten Tomatoes: "the consensus says ..." and goes on to a one paragraph summary of the question and responses. It'd be useful on posts with lots of answers, esp, and of course indexable by search engines. As for who could edit, maybe OP, top answerers by selection and votes. – bishop Jul 10 '19 at 22:55
  • @bishop So, something maintained separately... which could be invalidated as soon as the question or its answers are added, removed, or edited. Given the volume and volatility of questions and answers, I don't know that a rotten tomatoes model is applicable. – canon Jul 11 '19 at 16:24
  • Currently we have the side bar with related questions - thus imagine each answer expanding as you hover to show the top 3-5 answers by vote and then when you hover, you can see the expanded answer. – d4c0d312 Jul 11 '19 at 17:17

I think the broad concept is very useful for cross-checking and cross-referencing posts, rather than actually interacting with linked posts.

However, in response to Cerbrus' answer:


I agree with this in part, but I think the most useful thing is to:

  • Reference the age of the linked Question
  • Reference the score of the linked Question
  • Reference the status (ie has it been answered?) and number of answers to the linked Question

Case point - How I would use this system:

I am finding a regular occurance of dupe references to other questions that do not have answers or dupe references that are otherwise not valid and only related by title to the original question.

Currently I need to Shift + click the referenced possible dupe and read it, whereas with a popup it takes literal seconds to double check that, at least preliminarily - the dupe is a good call.

Is the dupe the same question? Has the Dupe been answered and accepted? Is the answer scored well (ie above 1)? These things can be solved with a hover popup (less than a full server page call) rather than having to load another page in full and then returning to the original question.


Only the above details are I believe necessary (please expand if there's more you'd need?) The pop up would not be intended to present the whole question/answer.

The popup can easily show vertical scroll bars and the system can be active on non-mobile only display types to minimise screen jumble.

I disagree with the original question statment that voting/full question/answer details should be shown; it should simply be a "summary view" in my opinion.


I donot see this as a practical argument. If I visit a page with a reference, I then have to click the link, load the reference, decide if it's what I need (for whatever reason) and then step back to the original question ; therefore I am loading two pages from the server, rather than with a hover link loading just one.

Maybe someone from Wikipedia can give advise on server costs but I think there would be a minimal increase; especially if the link only presents a "summary" rather than a full layout of the question.

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    Thanks, very good explained and exactly what I thought it should look like later. I haven't edited my question yet but agree to just show a summary and some necessary information. – muuvmuuv Jul 8 '19 at 12:43

I think this is a great idea to quickly determine whether a question is relevant to the user and worth visiting.

What we should do is show the full question in the popup - or parts of it. Similar to how Trello did it, SO could compute an image snapshot of the question and then display that instead of actual text/imagery. Then, for lengthy question, only show the first few hundred pixels of the snapshot and fade out the rest. That allows for a glance but still leaves the user wanting to open the question.

What we should not do is show any answers or comments in the popup:

  1. this ensures the page is still visited, which:
    • ...keeps the voting system alive
    • ...makes sure pages are visited (important to SO)
  2. reading answers this small isn't a great experience anyway
  3. the popup would be unnecessarily long
  4. we would treat answers differently
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    "What we should do is show the full question in the popup." Even if that question is longer than the window's height allows? We wouldn't want popups that cover the whole page... Or contains scrollbars. How would that work with stack snippets? – Cerbrus Jul 8 '19 at 11:47
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    Okay, agreed, let's show a fixed height as preview and then fade out the rest. How about that? We could also show an actual preview, as in a screenshot that is computed somehow. I know Trello does this so it should be possible... That would also answer your question about stack snippets. – LinusGeffarth Jul 8 '19 at 11:51
  • That's an option, but then what can you really show? The question's title, and some content. Possibly only the introduction / background information. That doesn't seem that useful to me. – Cerbrus Jul 8 '19 at 11:53
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    I think there's one major problem with this -- what if it's a link to an answer or a comment? I think a comment link should be left as it is now with no pop-over. However, if someone were linking to a useful answer, the pop-over should show that answer. – Steve-o169 Jul 8 '19 at 12:21
  • Got your points, especially the "pages are visited" part is very important! So in my above preview: removing the answer and make the question longer + add a symbol somewhere to show how many people have answered and if one is accepted. Would that be acceptable? – muuvmuuv Jul 8 '19 at 12:21
  • @Steve-o169 good idea: Question links shows the question, comments the comment and question title and answers the answer with question title? – muuvmuuv Jul 8 '19 at 12:22
  • We already have a pretty good implementation in the Close Vote dialog (for duplicates). It would be nice to reuse that for such popups. – muru Jul 9 '19 at 10:26
  • Indeed! That's also possible to use @muru – LinusGeffarth Jul 9 '19 at 10:34

I see multiple problems with this proposal.

  1. What should be done with linked questions/answers/comments those are deleted now?
  2. This will not be a fair treatment to other answers for that question. Only accepted or top answers will be visible in popup.
  3. If user find the solution through popup only, they will be reluctant to vote on it - though some mechanism is provided on popup.
  4. The top/accepted answer displayed in popup may not be helpful to the user but other answers/comments may be. By looking at popup - not finding it helpful, users will be reluctant to click the link and read the complete thread.
  5. Should we also load comments in popup? If yes - more problems. If no - we may be hiding important information.
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    (5: Comments are never important information.) – Cerbrus Jul 8 '19 at 11:31
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    @Cerbrus: Agreed that comments should not hold important information. Though many posts have comments that contain really a day saver. They may contain criticism which is definitely important. Links to other supporting resource may be. What you are saying is true and expected but not the fact. – Amit Joshi Jul 8 '19 at 11:33
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    1. don't show a popup; 2. only show the question: imo, the popup shouldn't be for reading answers but for determining whether the question is worth visiting, that also ensures continuous page views; 3. see 2.; 4. see 2.; 5. see Cerbrus' comment above. – LinusGeffarth Jul 8 '19 at 11:35
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    @LinusGeffarth: Comment from you and from Cerbrus - both hold important information IMO. Both these comments cannot be edited in answer. So obviously those should stay and helpful for future readers. I know this is meta; but we see many similar cases on main. – Amit Joshi Jul 8 '19 at 11:42
  • I added mine as a separate answer :) – LinusGeffarth Jul 8 '19 at 11:53
  • Those are good points and I agree with @LinusGeffarth. Like I commented on another answer; only showing the question is fine, at first I just want some "first sight" information to see before leaving the question I'm currently viewing. My above preview is just an fast example. We could also just simply it and just show relevant information like: title, question, answers, accepted answer yes/no, datetime, views and upvotes. – muuvmuuv Jul 8 '19 at 12:26

This is a very good idea. If you can show the fully question & (fully accepted or highly upvoted answer) with a scroll bar to a popup will be helpful for most users.

I am not saying to load all those things at page load. If you can load content using Ajax when mouse hover it is great. Then, It won't be a performance issue also.

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    The full question/answer might be a bit much, maybe an excerpt with a 'Read More'. – Script47 Jul 8 '19 at 9:46
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    Scrollbars don't belong in pop-ups... – ivarni Jul 8 '19 at 9:47
  • @ivarni It is possible for bootstrap models & I have done it. bootply.com/T0yF2ZNTUd ... So I think making fully custom also should be possible, but 100% not sure. – I am the Most Stupid Person Jul 8 '19 at 9:50
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    @IamtheMostStupidPerson ivarni isn't saying you can't do it, he's saying you shouldn't do it. – Script47 Jul 8 '19 at 9:50
  • @Script47 Thanks, got it. – I am the Most Stupid Person Jul 8 '19 at 9:51
  • Yep I would use an approach like react/vue/angular use for routing to load the modal content on hover and/or load it after everything has loaded on the page (except for mobile of course). – muuvmuuv Jul 8 '19 at 9:59
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    I would not add a scrollbar because it would just overload the functionality of a pop-over this belongs more to modals. But I agree with @Script47 to have some excerpt just to show that there is much more text to read but for that the user must load it in a new tab. I just wanted to introduce a method to quickly show some Q&A. Sometimes it's faster than actually following the link. – muuvmuuv Jul 8 '19 at 10:00
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    To the delete voters here: Please do not vote to delete content that you simply disagree with. – Rob Jul 11 '19 at 9:30

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