Hello, it looks like this behaviour changed over time and the external links (those directing users outside the community) don’t open in a new tab. 
 

I’ve tried adding target=”_blank” to the link attributes via HTML, but it does not seem to be working. 

If I’m not mistaken, it used to work before, so not sure if anything has changed here, or it wasn’t a case before.

Anyways, we would like to have external links open in a new tab, so the users don’t lose their Help article while e.g. submitting the form or downloading an app necessary for the process. 

I found this on a search for this feature, and just wanted to add my two cents - I’m really surprised this isn’t customisable in the editor, and I don’t find the resolution of opening in the same tab for internal links and a new tab for external links to be appropriate in all cases.

I recently published an article where I wanted to link out to a blog post we had written for context, but it was quite early in the piece and I wanted to make sure that the forum post was still open, and was surprised there was no way to do it. I tried changing the HTML as above with no result.

My solution was to shortlink with bit.ly to force the platform to recognise it as an external link, which works - but of course this doesn’t play as nice with our analytics.

Seems like this idea exists in several forms on this Community. I’m a bit surprised that this isn’t possible yet.