Auto-replace text with link to topic

Product Support

AI-generated summary

The discussion revolves around using the auto-replace feature in Discourse to link concept words and phrases to topics. RickThrivingNow initially struggled with this, finding that markdown and HTML in the replacement text weren’t rendered. itsbhanusharma suggested a theme component, but RickThrivingNow discovered that entering just the word and URL in the Admin → Customize → Watched Words → Replace section allows the feature to work without the theme component. This was confirmed by codinghorror, who noted that this is a built-in feature of Discourse.

1

I was hoping to use the auto-replace to take concept words and phrases and auto-link them to topics. Like

EFT Tapping

would link to a topic on that. However, if I use markdown or HTML in the replacement text, it ends up being visible – not rendered.

Did I miss something? Or does the replace with a link really mean that the word google would be replaced with the link:

If you want search google you can

can become

If you want to search https://google.com you can

but can’t become

If you want to search google you can

Am I correct?

Thanks!

2

Hi,

Have you tried using this theme component?

3

Thank you. That does work! There is a reply there which said they thought it was going to be included in Discourse Core, so I checked:

/admin/customize/watched_words/action/replace

If I just enter the word and then just put the URL without any markdown, it works! So that is how to get it to work without the autolink theme component.

Thanks for the heads up!
Rick

4

You don’t need a theme component, this is a built in feature of Discourse now.

Admin → Customize → Watched Words → Replace