Cheat and add links without backlinks

Hi, I’d like to add a sneaky link between two Org Roam nodes, but without generating a backlink.

Is this possible? I notice that the id:... format does generate a backlink. Is it possible to override?

- [[id:744b12b2-b93c-4ad9-9fd1-5f649eac548f][Motivation: For the sake of advancing AI]]

Right now you can define your own link type, e.g. sneaky:uuid and handle them the same way IDs are, and they won’t show up in the backlinks buffer.

Great, thanks. Here’s my minimal implementation, which works as desired.

(require 'ol)
(org-add-link-type "xid" 'org-open-xid)
(defun org-open-xid (xid)
  (org-open-link-from-string (concat "id:" xid)))
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Just out of curiosity. For what kind of use do you need a link of this type “without backlink”?

One use case is inspired by interactive fiction:

I want to send people back to the beginning of the document to “play through” as another character, depending on what “ending” they wind up with. (If I allowed a backlink, this would be a spoiler!)

But, more generally, I might want to introduce “incidental” links that aren’t structurally important. There are many places where I say “as discussed in page such-and-such”, but without a link, because otherwise, everything would end up interrelated to everything else.

(This does suggest another question: could Org Roam Server be tweaked to support typed links in the graph? If that was possible, I could filter the graph by link type (x1id, x2id, and so on). That sounds like a fun project for a month of rainy Sundays.)

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Definitely possible, although we have yet to start exploring in this direction.

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