Hashtags In Posts!

I'll fold this into the general announcements thread later, but for now I felt it was so cool it deserved it's own thread.

I give you the next great forum innovation, in the tradition of Twitter and Facebook! #Hashtags In Posts!

Not long after I created this forum, I discovered a plugin called #hashtag in post. Basically type a # and put something immediately after it and you had a hashtag, creating a click-able search-link for that hashtag. There was just one problem, it wanted to turn damn near anything with a # in it into a hashtag, which is not good, especially on a site with a lot of issue #'s. A lot of forums gave up on even using the plugin because of that problem.

The plugin developer kept trying to code around that problem, with minimal success. Just recently me and another forum admin convinced him to add some custom BB code to the plugin, so instead of typing #hashtagsinposts for example, you would type:

[ # ]hashtagsinposts without the spaces, or put another way [*#*]hashtagsinposts without the the *

(ordinarily I'd use codetags, but even codetags will not stopping this plugin, it's that POWERFUL!)
and upon posting the two brackets disappear and you have a click-able hashtagged search-link!

[HASH]hashtagsinposts

I've combined it with the new "Hashcloud" plugin to show a list of the hashtags currently being most-used. See "Trending on ABP" at the top of the right sidebar.

Hashtags have to be alpha-numeric, so just letters and numbers, no spaces or other characters.

So a hashtag of UncannyXMen316 is fine and will render as #UncannyXMen316

but one of Uncanny X-Men 316 will render as just Uncanny

and one of UncannyX-Men316 will just render as UncannyX

So, no spaces, no funny characters, just letters and numbers. And remember to wrap your # in brackets or it wont work.

This will be handy here in a number of ways. In ongoing discussion threads, All-New X-Factor for example, you could mark the posts for an individual issue being discussed, like: #allnewxfactor14. You could also use it to unify posts in separate threads that have a common theme, such as #AXISevent or #AXIStiein. You could also use it to make it easier to search for art or fanfics by character: #Gambitfic or #Nightcrawlerpic, I'm thinking of creating a registry for that.

Have fun!