Anchor and Goto Links

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Summary

Ability to create 'anchors' and 'gotos' to easily navigate between sections of a long thread.

 

Description

Imagine the Contents box of a well-formatted wiki page. You click on one of the titles in the box, and BOOM!, it takes your browser to a section of the page with the corresponding heading. The link in the Contents box is what I mean by 'goto,' and the heading is what I mean by 'anchor.'

 

     

Left: Goto in Orange. Right: Anchor in Purple. (Wikipedia Article)

 

In BBcode, I imagine formatting would look something like this:

[anchor]Text 1[/anchor]

[goto="Text 1"]Text 2[/goto]

 

So, if I were to use the example in the Wiki article above:

[anchor]NCIX and Linus Tech Tips[/anchor]

[goto="NCIX and Linus Tech Tips"]1.1 NCIX and Linus Tech Tips[/goto]

 

Unsure how it would actually be implemented with Invision Community, however.

 

Use

Could see it being used in tutorials, guides, informative articles, and build logs on the forums. Many of these threads are split into sections, and it would be very convenient to skip forward to particular sections of the thread with just a click, instead of scrolling down endlessly.

 

Mostly pushing for this suggestion out of self-interest. There's a long thread I wrote up, and navigating it would be considerably easier with some well-placed anchors and gotos.

 

Links

Might provide some additional context. None of them provide actual solutions, however.

• Wiki Markup for Pages 1.0.0 on Invision Community Marketplace.
  • The anchor box menu in this package is sort-of what I'm getting at. Click on an item, and it brings you to the respective anchored text. Minus the box menu. Unsure whether the plugin for Pages works with Forums.
• Download: Anchor BBCode on Invision Community Forums.
  • More accurate example of what I'm suggesting. Set an anchor and a goto. Click on goto, it brings you to the anchor. Unfortunately, the thread is very dated, and the download link is borked in the forum thread, so I don't know the details of the proposed download/XML files.

 

Personal Thoughts

Would've liked to have provided a better plan of action and better sources before making a suggestion, but I know basically nothing when it comes to coding/scripting.

 

And I understand that the suggested feature isn't essential to forum functionality -- it's just a quality-of-life thing, and there are workarounds (CTRL + F is one, categorizing with Spoilers is another). But I figured that it wouldn't do any harm to put forth a suggestion. Best-case scenario, it gets implemented. Worst-case scenario, nothing changes.

[colonel_mortis]

BBCode is deprecated by IPS (with intent to remove at some unspecified point in the future), so a BBCode based solution isn't going to work here. That means it would need to be a proper integration into the editor, but because of the way that the editor is bundled that's quite difficult to do (it would need both an interface for adding anchors at arbitrary points on the page, and an interface for adding links to those anchors), then I think it would also cause issues with the way we sanitise the content in the backend.

 

In short, if I had unlimited time then this would be a neat thing to have, but as it is it's a lot of work for not a huge amount of benefit, so it won't be happening I'm afraid.

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9 minutes ago, colonel_mortis said:

BBCode is deprecated by IPS (with intent to remove at some unspecified point in the future), so a BBCode based solution isn't going to work here. That means it would need to be a proper integration into the editor, but because of the way that the editor is bundled that's quite difficult to do (it would need both an interface for adding anchors at arbitrary points on the page, and an interface for adding links to those anchors), then I think it would also cause issues with the way we sanitise the content in the backend.

Oooh, interesting. Didn't think BBCode would be phased out not-so-soon™. 

No comments on the interface, and I understand where you're coming from with the cascading effect part.

 

9 minutes ago, colonel_mortis said:

In short, if I had unlimited time then this would be a neat thing to have, but as it is it's a lot of work for not a huge amount of benefit, so it won't be happening I'm afraid.

Not a problem. Even without the anchor/goto feature, personally I'm very happy with the way the forums are run currently.

 

My thanks for the informative reply, and for all the behind-the-scenes work the Admin/Mod team does for the community here.