Board Thread:Support Requests - Getting Technical/@comment-452-20140917000024/@comment-452-20150817191825

Thank you for your reply! It's nice to know there's still someone who isn't afraid to make an on-topic comment in an older thread. It's a shame that on-topic replies to older threads are not allowed everywhere, causing many people to feel compelled to justify their replies, and preface them with "I know this is an old topic".

"Valid wiki detection" is a good reason, and I'm also surprised that no-one else mentioned it.

Upon closer inspection, it doesn't seem to me that that's an intended feature, it's just that the lookup checks for "w:c:" first, finds nothing, and then matches "w:", therefore defaulting to "http://community.wikia.com/wiki/c:". It's definitely a useful emergent behaviour, nonetheless.

a[href^="http://community.wikia.com/wiki/c:"] {color:red} works fine, btw, so there is no need to use javascript - but changing the colour of detectably-wrong links is still a good concept which I'll use myself.

Incidentally, I rarely check the validity of external links myself, unless it's a reference and I'm personally interested in verifying the information. If I'm observing an external link at all, it's either in a diff or when editing. When other users add links to a related subject on another wiki, I assume they've linked to the correct page, as it's no skin off my nose if they misspelled it. (Of course, this means that someone could add "This character is named after the Transformer of the same name", but I'm sure someone else would eventually notice.)

For the record, I am still using the template I created based on JoshuaJSlone's suggestion, and it works perfectly.

Had I not made this thread after the other one was locked, I would not have found this outstanding solution.

Thanks again JoshuaJSlone, and to everyone else who stayed on-topic!