The discussion explores user feedback on Discourse’s autolinking feature, which automatically converts specific keywords into hyperlinks. JammyDodger initiates the thread by asking for opinions on current links (Data Explorer, DiscourseConnect, etc.) and suggestions for additions. dax proposes adding official plugins, themes, and theme components, linking to their respective tag pages.
While many users, including Moin and Arkshine, find autolinking useful for saving time, they report that excessive linking in documentation distracts from reading flow. Common suggestions to mitigate this include limiting links to once per paragraph or section, excluding headings, and preventing self-linking within the same topic. dax agrees that only the first instance of a word should be linked in a post. satonotdead supports these limits to allow for more comprehensive linking without visual clutter.
A specific concern raised by Moin is that autolinking only works in English, making it unreliable for international audiences. Consequently, they now prefer using templates or manually copying links from the preview for important references. Additionally, Jagster and Moin criticize the formatting of index topics, where autolinking creates redundant or confusing links. JammyDodger explains this formatting is necessary for the sidebar indexes but suggests unlisting these base topics to reduce visual noise. The consensus is that while autolinking is valuable, it requires stricter limits and better handling of multilingual contexts and index displays.
Hello 
Quick question about what your thoughts are around our autolinking - do you find it useful, or do any of them get on your nerves? Are there any you’d wish to add, or even some you’d like to remove?
We currently have:
Let me know what you think. 
For obvious reasons, I would like to add:
Where would they link? To pages like https://meta.discourse.org/tags/c/plugin/22/official ?
Both.
I find it useful when I use them in posts. For example, I can easily ask “Have you tried safe mode?” and there is no need to manually add the link which explains what safe-mode is and how to use it. Though I would sometimes prefer a template, because I tend to write “safe-mode” and at the moment I have to use the preview to check whether I used the correct spelling. So I could suggest adding safe-mode but I like that I can reduce the number of links by using a different spelling.
This leads me to:
It gets on my nerves when I read documentation, like:
It distracts me while reading. There are a lot of links which were probably all added because of autolinking. But I still feel the need to check whether they really are. It could be that some of them were added intentionally, linking to something else.
That’s why it sometimes disturbs my reading flow. But this could be solved by limiting the number of times a watched word is linked or restricting auto-linking to e.g. “data explorer plugin”.
I have a similar feedback as Moin.
Super useful. It saves a lot of time and energy.
There are, for sure, edgy cases where the same word is auto-linked too many times in guides.
Possible suggestions:
Overall, it’s really good and convenient. I would be careful about what words to add, though. [1]
About what to add, let’s see,
I wonder what the statistics are. Based on how often a link is referred to, it could be a good idea to add a keyword for that link. 
For example, trust level would be likely overwhelming without any control. ↩︎
Yep,
I agree, however, we should limit auto-linking in posts. If I write Data Explorer 5 times in a single post, I don’t need 5 links in that post. Only the first instance should be linked, and the others ignored.
I think the additional links in the index topics are very confusing
Plus repeating same thing looks… odd.
Those index topics are the base for the doc sidebar indexes themselves so the formatting is what helps makes the magic happen (display title: link). 
Though I think there’s a case for unlisting the index topics now we have the actual sidebars in place and making them more a background thing.
I know that. And yet it looks odd. And in some cases a row will be so long that there isn’t enough room to show all the text — or that was situation earlier when I tested it on my forum [1]
and that is one reason, with a lot of manual work, why it is on hold and I’m trying to figure out do I need that option; but that is only my headache, but layout issues are not 
↩︎
I think the short titles are definitely important to get right as the space is limited for them. Bert did the first pass, but I do plan on having a second go to smooth out any weird ones.
For the auto-linking, I’m not sure if one of the usual tricks of breaking up the watched word with <guff> would work for these ones. I think hiding the base index topic would be less of a faff.
I changed my mind. Since I don’t know which language the user is reading the topic in, I can no longer rely on the autolinking. It works only in English. So when I ask
I don’t know if the user will see the link or just something like
So, for important links, autolinking is now only helpful while writing, as I can copy the link from the preview instead of searching. But that is something a template would provide too.
I’m with this and it will allow me to link a lot more of words, without ruining the visual aesthetics or adding the discussed distractions.
