Walkthrough - Referencing another post on the forum

While the "Quote" feature allows you cite or part of a preceding post in the same topic, sometimes you will need to draw the reader's attention to either a separate topic or even a particular post within another part of the forum.

Linking to another topic

Firstly, we'll look at referencing another topic. Let's say you want to direct the reader to look at the posts discussing the options for meeting times, using a phrase like:

We previously discussed meeting times, but I'd like to comment on the length of meetings.

You can make the words "meeting times" a hyperlink to the original topic.

When doing things like this, it's usually best to have two browser windows (or tabs) open on the forum: One for creating your new post, the other to locate the item you want to reference.

Start by creating your new post (for illustration, we're using the Sand Box forum for this) and type in the text and highlight the words "meeting times":

Now, click on the URL button to place the hyperlink "tags" around these words:

Next, go to your other browser window and locate the topic you want to reference. In this case it is in SJTAG Forum Index » Weekly Minutes » Suggestions for new meeting time. Once you have the topic open, highlight and copy the URL from the browser's address bar:

Notice the argument "t=17" at the end? The "t" tells you that this is a reference to a topic ("f" indicates a forum, and "p" indicates a post). Now, go back to the editing screen and edit the opening [url] tag by adding an "=" then paste in the URL of the original topic:

When you Preview your post, you should see that "meeting times" is rendered in blue text, indicating a hyperlink:

You can test your link from the Preview - clicking on it should open the target topic in a new browser window.

Complete the rest of your post, and once you're happy with it, click on the Submit button.

Linking to a specific post

The process for linking to a specific post within a topic is a bit trickier. The general process is the same as linking to a topic, but how you get the correct URL for the post isn't particularly obvious!

For this example, we'll use the same meeting times topic, but this time we want to reference Adam's post which mentions the EST/UTC timezone adjustments:

You can see we're using the words "earlier post" as the link here.

Now, back to the original topic window. Here's the trick: Pay close attention to the top bar of the post you want to reference, and look for the little page icon, highlighted in the illustration below.

Click on that page icon and the page will re-load, and the browser's address bar will now show the URL of the post itself, indicated by the p=24#24 argument:

As before, we just copy and paste the URL into the opening [url] tag in the new post (not forgetting the "=") and it's ready to Preview:

Complete the creation of the post as normal and Submit it when you're done.

Don't be tempted to edit the numbers in the arguments to point to other places: It won't work, as these index numbers are assigned in order of creation across the whole forum, not just for that topic!