Auto-linking words in forum to definitions

If you create a topic, or reply to a topic, you might notice that as soon as you've completed your post some of the words immediately have links which go to other pages on this site. (This will also happen with private messages that you send as well as dictionary definitions that you create.)

The reason that we've done this is to try and help new traders keep up with the experienced traders when they are posting commentary in real-time.

Here's an example:

BruceM started a great topic on 9 June 2010 called Being Wrong and the 3 DAR.

On the 30 June 2010 buried deep as a reply in a this topic sjzeno asks:
Bruce do you have the DAR for today realquick?

So a new trader coming the the topic and reading that for the first time might be confused about what a DAR is.

So what we did was to take Bruce's great topic and create a definition for it in the dictionary. Now, anytime someone enters DAR or dar or DaR in the forum those words will be linked to the definition so you can quickly find what it means.

As we go along we'll be trying to add more and more definitions and link them to words. If you see a word that's posted in a forum that's not linked and you think it should be then send me a Private Message and I'll try and sort it out.

Some things we can't link. For example, we often see O/N in the forum to refer to the overnight session. Because the word "on" is so common in most sentences it will be out-of-context to link it most of the time. As such you just need to remember to put a slash between the O and the N to get the link to work. i.e. O/N.

Update on auto-linking:

Because of the interest in the Daily Notes that the site generates a new section called Daily Notes for Stocks and auto-linking for known stock ticker symbols was activated from the forum.

Although we never received any complaints about the auto-linking of a lot of ordinary words in the forums to the stock ticker they were out-of-context and it was possible that this was confusing or not creating an optimal experience for the trader. As such we are now only auto-linking stock symbols that are capitalized. For example, MSFT and GOOG will be auto-linked but msft and goog will not. All of the letters in the word need to be in upper case in order for the auto-link to work so MsFT would not auto-link.

Hopefully this improves the forum for everyone.