Okay, I’m new at this, I’ll admit it. How do you post a link to another thread? The part that I’m really having trouble with is figuring out the thread ID. Thanks for any and all help.
You can go to the thread you want to link to and copy the url out of your brouser’s address bar.
tgkk, I’m going to expand just a little bit on Santos L Halper’s response. (by the way, nice punny name – I like it.) While there are other slightly more complicated ways of doing it, the way I do it is the same as Santos.
Let’s say you’re in a thread and you want to post a link to another thread that you remember, or have bookmarked.
Open a second window and navigate via a search or simply using the bookmark, to the thread you want to link to. Select and copy the thread URL from the browser’s address bar.
Then go back to the first thread and select the Reply button. Then simply construct the vBulletin coding to do the link:
… will come out as
tgkk, if what’s driving you nuts is trying to get it all nice and tidy like Algernon’s link, so it has a word highlighted in blue and you can’t see all that http stuff–don’t sweat it. We don’t really have to see your links all nice and tidy like Algernon’s, we’re happy just to have the link so we can see what thread you’re referring to. And VBulletin automatically shortens it for display purposes in the finished thread, so it doesn’t do gonzo things to the word wrap in the thread, like some other message board software does.
You don’t need to mess around with the thread ID number at all. It’s all Copy and Paste. The Quick N Dirty Version is (assuming the presence of Windows):
[ul]
[li] bring the thread you wanna provide a link to up in another window.[/li][li] highlight its URL up in the Address bar by left-clicking the mouse once on it[/li][li] then Copy the URL onto the Clipboard by either hitting Control + C on the keyboard, or by right-clicking on the highlighted URL and selecting Copy from the teeny menu that pops up[/li][li] then move the mouse cursor to the Reply box of the thread you’re posting the link in, in the other window (you do this by clicking the mouse once in the Reply box)[/li][li] and hit Paste (that’s Control + V on the keyboard, or right-click the mouse in the Reply box and select Paste on the teeny menu that pops up). The URL will magically appear in your Reply box. And like I said, it’s fine if it’s all “http”.[/ul][/li]
It takes longer to describe that it does to do.
Like a sex manual.
And P.S.
[ul]
and use Preview to make sure it Copied and Pasted correctly, because we don’t know which is more annoying: someone’s link that didn’t “make” and they didn’t use Preview to check it before they posted and so in order to look at it, you have to Copy and Paste it yourself in your own window, grumbling; or someone whose link didn’t make who doesn’t come back and post the corrected, functioning link in the very next post so we don’t have to Copy and Paste it ourselves in our own window, grumbling.[/ul]
Heh, heh.
As always DDG, your explanation is both more accurate and more thorough than mine. Well done. I’ve been doing the full [url=] method for so long that I forgot that it’s unnecessary.
Well, can I ask a question? Some really intrepid Dopers can either
link directly to a post in a thread, so the only thing that comes up on the screen is the post;
or
link directly to a post in a thread, so the whole thread comes up but you zoom right to the selection instead of saying “Check out post #40 or whatever.”
Does anybody know how to do this?
This is the way I do it.
When you’re at the post you want to link to, click on the post number (for example, your post shows #6… click on the 6) and a new window opens. Then you do the same thing as described above for linking to a thread.
Simply copy and paste the URL:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=5363339&postcount=5
Or compose using the vB coding…
Link to individual post
…which shows as Link to individual post
The trick is nothing more than clicking on the post number to get what you want.
The way to link to a particular post but have the entire thread available by scrolling iis by using the following format (but I don’t know an easy way to get this… DDG?):
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?postid=5363339#post=5
Interestingly, using this last method the start of the post linked to is at the very bottom of the window (with Firefox as the browser anyway – I wonder if IE handles it better).
Links to the post by themselves are easy. You go to the thread you want, and then click on the number in the corner of the post you want. The OP will be 1, the first reply 2, and so on. This will bring up a window with just that post, just like you see on following one of those links. Now use the copy-and-paste URL method to post a link to that page, just like any other page.
For a link to the post in context, it’s a little more complicated. First, you need to find the postid number of the post you want. This will be a large number (about seven digits) that’s different for every single post on the Board. You can find it by hovering your mouse over the “reply” button (but not clicking it). At the bottom of your browser, you’ll see the address that that link points to, and it’ll end in a number. Then, you use the “post” tag, as follows:
[post=5362067]Algernon’s post[/post]
will come out as
[post=5362067]Algernon’s post[/post]
Hmmm. Elania, if you want to see the stuff that vBulletin removed from the middle of the http: coding, click on the “Reply” button on the right side. You can then see the full coding.
The way it is displaying is not particularly helpful.
Two things:
-
Chronos, that is cool. I didn’t know about the [post] tag.
-
Sorry for spelling your username incorrectly Elenia.
I copy the URL from the thread I want to link to. Then I click the “link” button at the top of the reply window (it looks like a globe with a chain in front of it.
A window pops up: I type what I want it to say i.e.:Funniest SMDB Threads.
Click OK.
A new window pops up. Paste the thread URL I copied before. Click OK.
Done.
If I hover my mouse over the reply button it only says “Reply With Quote”. I’m not getting any post id?
The post ID will be down in the status bar at the bottom of the window (assuming you have Internet Explorer).
The status bar is the place that will also tell you, “Opening page [whatever URL]” and it will have a, well, a status bar indicator or slider, that tells you how far along the page that’s loading is, so you have some idea of how badly it’s hung and whether you might as well go make a sandwich.
So if you can’t see it, go to View up at the top, and there’s a Dropdown menu there that says Toolbars, Status Bar, Explorer Bar, and other stuff. Click Status Bar, so there’s a check mark next to it. Then look down at the bottom of the window–there should be a bar there. Now hover your mouse over Reply. Watch incomprehensible gibberish magically appear in the bar.
Alternatively, if you hover your cursor over the post number (#nn) in the upper right hand corner of the post, you’ll also see the postid appear at the bottom status bar (as the very large number following a “p”).
Santos L Helper, Algernon, Chronos, Duck Duck Goose, & Filmgeek: Thank y’all very kindly. I was close to being on the right track, but you’ve made stuff much clearer.
Elenia28, thanks for asking your question, too. I wouldn’t have thought about that aspect of linking.
:smack: I was trying to see where the ID was in the little box that pops up in the rollover. I didn’t think of looking down at the status bar which I most definitely have.
Ugh.
Besides the [post] tag, there is also a [thread] tag.
[thread=275245]Thread[/thread]