All the links have to be set up manually. It’s essentially a map from an alias to a URL. For instance, here are the last three links I set up based on a user’s request on July 11:
My basic process for adding a new autolink is:
- Make sure people really use the alias to refer to the school. UMBC is a good example. Using the search feature, I found it is used often.
- Make sure it’s not used of other schools. UMD seems like it might be used of other schools, but it really is used for the College Park campus and nothing else that I saw.
- Sanity check that my changes worked as expected.
It’s not hugely time consuming, but it does require a bit of care. So that’s one reason we don’t have more links. Another reason is that we did a big push a couple years ago to identify the major schools and how people refer to them, but we haven’t done it for schools that aren’t often discussed. There’s a diminishing returns problem.
And that brings us to the original goal of autolinking: help visitors see that we have entire categories for discussing individual schools. The goal is worthwhile and we can see that people are following those links. (Since I added UMD, there has been a noticeable increase in people visiting the school’s category via internal links.) But is that benefit enough to justify the annoyance @lkg4answers noted that just mentioning a school often brings up an alert?
I’m going to bring it up internally next week. I’d be surprised if there aren’t better ways to achieve the goal we are aiming for. I can’t promise any changes, however. Our current focus is squarely on the site infrastructure is reliable.