Better way to announce new lessons

Based on recent improvements that I have seen, I dare to dream again…

My students are adults and their use of LIngQ is voluntary. Despite the fact that I post new lessons frequently, some of my students rarely or never go into LingQ to see what is new.

To try to pull them in, I have Telegram and WhatsApp groups where I post the names of the new lessons. I try to make them visually appealing by posting a screenshot of the lesson that includes the course icon. But today it hit me that it would be really great to include a link that went directly to the lesson.

I know that I can copy the sharing URL from the lesson and post that, but this is not very visually appealing since besides the link it only includes a blob of words talking about LingQ in general.

I could post my usual screenshot of the lesson and below it put in the URL, but again, the mass of words on the URL post is not visually appealing and takes up a lot of space in the chat, especially if I am announcing multiple lessons.

Ideally the link to the lesson would show the icon for the course, the name of the lesson, and the URL with a minimum of verbiage about LingQ.

Alternatively, the ability to just post the URL underneath my screenshot without the LingQ advertisement would be great. The people who will use this URL are already LingQ subscribers so they don’t really need the advertisement.

If my students could see a picture and a name and click directly into the lesson from the Whatsapp/Telegram group, I believe they would be more apt to use the lessons.

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As per this answer - javascript - How to disable / ignore rich link preview at server side - Stack Overflow it would potentially remove the preview (blob) altogether if you remove the https:// (or http://) prefix from the link, but the answer is from 2018 and potentially already patched. No idea if it’ll help you with sharing links on Telegram.

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Thank you very much, Gigusek. Before reading your repy, I never considered that fact that there was something I might do myself to prevent this. While trying out the solution you referenced above, I found that in both Whatsapp and Telegram, I can simply delete the preview before sending the link!

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Ahem, LingQ developers…It would still be wonderful to do this with only one click instead of several…

So…next problem. Yes, I can post the link to the lesson without the preview blob, BUT…

On my laptop, that link takes me straight into the lesson. On my Android, that worked for one day. Now the link only takes me to the course; it does not open the lesson.

I have no idea if it works on an iphone.

Why does it work once and never again?

More importantly, is there anything I can do about it?