2

There's an old joke among economists that it's safe to recycle test questions year after year because while the questions themselves don't change, the answers do.

This question is an exact duplicate of Links in comments. I'm re-asking it because a lot may have changed since October 28, 2011 and what was impossible then may be less impossible now.

In short, can links to questions & answers be converted to their titles?

1
  • I think the accepted answer to that question is still fine. It only takes me an extra five seconds or so.
    – user22815
    May 4, 2015 at 19:36

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
3

From Replace links with the current question title in comments on MSE:

No, because comments are processed on the fly. This means a page with 12 links would incur 12 additional database queries -- every time the page is loaded.

Comments are meant to be lightweight. If you want this, put your links in a post, where it is already supported.

Links are stored in the database as just the text. Not the markdown and html (like posts are). When a link is rendered, it grabs the text and renders it right then and there. To have links get auto nice titles, it would either mean:

  • Doubling the storage requirements of comments (there are 38,091,590 undeleted comments on Stack Overflow alone)
  • Suffering a performance hit when you render a page for each comment that has a link to another post.
    • Scan the raw link to see if its a link to another post
    • If so, hit the database to find the post (if its undeleted) and substitute the name

Neither of these appear to be acceptable tradeoffs for the ability to auto-pretty link a post for SE's developers and so, well, if you want a nice name to a title of a post, then you're left with the traditional format of [nice name](http://link.to.post).

One can also always grab the SE Comment Link Helper.

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .