The alert was intended is to give people a heads up that maybe they are duplicating a response that’s already been posted. So if you post a link to a news story about the topic and I missed that post, I have a chance to avoid repeating your point.
Personally, I think it’s marginally useful in normal situations. I frequently post duplicate links on purpose and I find it slightly annoying. But I dismiss the warning and keep writing. Unfortunately, the alert really doesn’t work well with how we are inserting links.
The way we are inserting these links is, what programmers call, a “hack”. (Think more of “hack author” and less “my computer was hacked”.) The links are inserted while you are are editing the post. But since the aliases are purposely designed to detect the most common way for schools to be identified, it’s not unusual for people to use an alias that triggers the link to be inserted. This is especially true if the discussion is about a handful of schools. (Now the alert is triggered when anyone mentions UMD or UCLA in this thread.)
The good news is that we have another way to insert the links after you submit a post. It’s a much better user experience because you won’t see this alert. There are a few downsides from our perspective:
- It will only apply to posts after the change. The current system is retroactive to post written all the way back to the start of the site. After we make the change, only new posts will have the links.
- We won’t be able to easily change the destination of the links after the post has been created. For instance, we are considering pointing to the school pages on CC instead of the school category.
- It’ll take a bit of work to prepare the configuration to cover all the schools we currently have links for and add ones we missed.
That said, we’re planning on making the change. I don’t yet have a timeline, but because of #1, the sooner we do this the better! We are also considering using the school page as I mentioned in #2. While we are at it, I’m going to start a thread to get suggestions for schools and common ways to refer to them that we might be missing.