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I'm very often in the situation of having to link to another post (mostly questions) from comments. As moderator of TeX SE, I often link to related or duplicate questions. I can't use the "close as duplicate" feature to add such links automatically because of my moderator status, as long as I don't want to close the question immediately.

Now, I find it good style to have the link in the form of [post title](http://posturl), not just http://posturl. A comment like "Related question: Foo baz bar" is simply more readable and informative than "Related question: http://xyz.stackexchange.com/q/1235/6789". Unfortunately, pasting the URL into the comment doesn't convert it to this format automatically, as is done for questions and answers. Such a feature request for comments has already been declined.

At the moment, I manually mark and copy the question title to the URL bar of my browser and add the required [ ] and ( ) (and with the new Firefox version also the http:// :-( ) and then copy the whole thing to the other question.

I'd like to suggest the following feature: In addition to the existing 'share' button below every post, there could be another one which instead provides the required format [post title](http://posturl). This way a question can be linked to quickly from a comment or as part of a chat message. Answer posts can have the same button which could either still use the question title (but answer URL) or add a "Answer to " or similar in front of the title.

This feature should be easy to implement (maybe as a greasemonkey script) while avoiding the drawbacks of an automated conversion mentioned in the accepted answer of the above linked feature-request.

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    stackapps.com/questions/2378/comment-link-autoprettifier
    – balpha StaffMod
    Commented Mar 22, 2012 at 15:26
  • Suggestion: Could be labelled "StackExchange" link (or similar), and be based only on the post (and not the user, since there is no count of user referrals to a post from within the SE network)
    – yoozer8
    Commented Mar 22, 2012 at 15:34
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    possible duplicate of Userscript to auto-replace SOFU links in comments?
    – avpaderno
    Commented Mar 22, 2012 at 15:34
  • @kiamlaluno: I'm actually not asking about an userscript but about a new native feature of the website. An userscript however would be an acceptable makeshift solution if this feature-request gets declined, but there is no reason IMHO to close it as duplicate.
    – Martin Scharrer
    Commented Mar 22, 2012 at 15:37
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    In your question you say, "maybe also as greasemonkey script."
    – avpaderno
    Commented Mar 22, 2012 at 15:58
  • Yes, please, copy & paste on mobile is driving me nuts! (Yes, that would imply that mobile would get such links too. These are missing right now; quite annoying, I'd say. Any link to start with would be an improvement.)
    – Arjan
    Commented Jul 27, 2012 at 18:48

1 Answer 1

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You mention:

I'm very often in the situation that I have to link to another post (mostly questions) from a comment. As moderator of http://tex.stackexchange.com I often link to related or duplicate questions

As a fellow moderator, I understand your position completely! Mods use the site a lot, and perform many repetitive tasks on it. Most mods would happily trade a little higher complexity and clutter on the site for more features that make their job easier:

enter image description here

However, most new users don't want to see a dozen links cluttering up the bottom of each post. They wouldn't use these links often enough to make the learning curve worthwhile, and would prefer that the interface be cleaner, like this:

enter image description here

Moderators are an extreme minority on the network, it would be silly to make everyone use Visual Studio when what all the normal users wanted was Notepad. Userscripts are a great bridge between these two positions.

This problem actually has three userscript solutions:

and the first two are described in this question proposed as a duplicate by Kiamlaluno.

Basically, as a mod, get used to Userscripts. There are a lot of helpful scripts on Stack Apps, a few that I like (as a mod) are:

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  • Clever analogy, but isn't it usually the expert and experienced code ninjas that use plain text editors, rather than bloated and full-featured IDEs? :-)
    – Cody Gray
    Commented Mar 23, 2012 at 2:27
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    @CodyGray - Yes, but those text editors have even more tools than Visual Studio or Eclipse: You just have to type them instead of click them. But that wouldn't make for a good analogy, now would it?
    – Kevin Vermeer
    Commented Mar 23, 2012 at 2:51
  • Thanks, I started to use the mentioned scripts, which do the job well enough!
    – Martin Scharrer
    Commented Apr 13, 2012 at 21:34
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    I now improved the mentioned script Copy Question Link Markdown - Making it easier to copy links to questions! to better suit my needs. This is now exact what I wanted. Having it as userscript is fine. Thanks again for your answer.
    – Martin Scharrer
    Commented Apr 14, 2012 at 13:02
  • But then, @Martin, how to run that in mobile Safari, Chrome, Firefox...?
    – Arjan
    Commented Jul 27, 2012 at 18:49

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