Replace trilogy raw links with the current question title?

Question

It often happens that people will refer to other questions by simply pasting the full link to this question, especially on Meta.

Would it be a good idea to detect such links, and replace them directly by a formatted link on their current title?

Example:

 You can try formatting at this
 question:
 https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/49424/stack-exchange-sandbox

Would be automatically changed in:

You can try formatting at this question: Stack Exchange Sandbox

It would make links given by new users (unaware of the full syntax) more elegant, and it would also be faster when more regular (and lazy) users want to point to another question without making the usual "see it at this other place"

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Edit: Note that this behaviour is implemented already for the "possible duplicate" auto comments, so the question here is not about "how to do this technically".

Answer 1

For intra-site links (like, SO -> SO) this is now supported.

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/49424/stack-exchange-sandbox

becomes*

Stack Exchange Data Explorer

Like with tag rewrites this is done on post submission and is not currently reflected in the editor preview. It will always insert the current title into the post, at post creation time. However, should the title subsequently change it will not be updated unless the post is edited.

_{*Note that although the old title of the question is in the link, the new one is inserted.}

Answer 2

I like this idea a lot, it would save me from having to generate links the "right" way and I do think it would make the site a lot cleaner. I think it would also make comments much more elegant. I do, however, fear that it might be a pain to implement. (Not sure about that, really depends a lot on how the backend works. As Brandon pointed out, it might not be that difficult after all.)

EDIT: this is now supported:

Replace trilogy raw links with the current question title?

AWESOME!

Answer 3

To indicate that this is an automated link and more importantly to which SE-site it links, a small logo could be placed next to the question title

edit feature-requested

Answer 4

Could we not add a new button to the Toolbar - link to SE question.

This could open a popup where you

• Select the site that the question is on (drop down?)

  • Then search for the question to link to (similar to how the Title textbox works when asking a new question.)

    Or

  • Enter the question number to link to.

The popup validates that it is a valid question and then inserts the nice formatted link in to your answer/question for you.

I think it should handle multiple inserts elegantly too. By that I mean it should take care of the " see here, here, here and here " type of linking.

EDIT

Pekka's comment on this has just got me thinking about this.

The process for selecting links could be shortened somewhat by simply getting the user to enter the question/answer id. If one question or answer is found then it would simply add the nicely formatted link in. If there is more than one ID e.g. exists in more than one site then user selected which one they want and it adds in.

Another way to do this would be to enable some kind of shortcut pattern which is converted to a nice link when posted. The shortcut pattern could be a site ID and then Q/A ID.

Entering [SO:9033] in a post would be transformed to Hidden Features of C#? when posted.

Using 2-3 characters for the site code should be plenty enough to allow for existing sites and new sites.

Answer 5

bug

It was not working in this intra-site example:

If you click the above link you will see that the titles are now rendering correctly, but only because we edited the post to use much longer links, which are not the URLs we get from clicking the "share" button.

This also means that my userID of "5" is not included anywhere any more, and therefore I won't get the "announcer" badge when 25 people click one of the links.

Answer 6

I like this idea.

However, there is a problem with punctuation and capitalization.

C++ Beginner - Trouble using classes inside of classes

would probably end up looking like

c beginner trouble using classes inside of classes

Which, as you can see, kind of changes what the question is about (C++ to c). This would be a problem unless you were committing to do a DB lookup every time a link is typed in/submitted in a comment or answer, in order to the get the correctly cased and punctuated title. Those lookups may add up (look at how many links I used in this post alone, so isn't necessarily a good idea in terms of performance. Although, Jeff might just want to throw some hardware at it.

Simple Spec

All links of the format

"http://[((meta.)?stackoverflow|superuser|serverfault).com/questions/[\d]/ < QuestionTitle>"

(Could somebody fix my regex, I'm rusty)

would automatically be converted to

< QuestionTitle>

Or, if the question title is too long

vb net how to require checkedlistbox... or VB.NET: how to require CheckedListBo...

This would only be done once, at the time that the comment or question is initially linked. If the title of the question changes, the comment text would not change, because the link itself has not changed.

This magical replacement does not apply to people who are linking directly to answers, edit pages, or specific revisions. It could theoretically work for user pages, or tag pages.

Second option

A second alternate implementation would be to green jagged underline the link (like a grammar error), and have a rollover click option that says "convert to title hyperlink" or some such text. This would do the conversion that I described earlier, except that it would be optional. Further, because it would be replacing the text before the user has submitted the comment, it shows them how to do linking correctly (which they might not now) and it gives them the chance to change how it will appear. This is almost ALWAYS better than any "autocorrect" options. I hate autocorrect.

The (rather large) downside is that this would be more difficult to implement than a straight Regex replace.