Issue: Autolinking doesn't work in [template] inserted content

Auto-link will only occur on the outermost page's text. So text in the current page, and text in that page that is part of the TEMPLATE call's parameter values. But text inside the template is not. That would be a major resource hog -- probably all your pages would time out -- to run the auto-linker separately for each template and each sub-template as well, however deep the chain goes. It's better for your server and your loading times to just to put the link inside the template.

Auto-linking is not intended to be a replacement for linking. It was originally designed to help with content discovery for users who are mentioning topics in the wiki without realizing it and the users who are reading their posts, as those users cannot be expected to update posts from 10 years ago now that a wiki page has been added. But wiki content is a different animal, and wiki writers should have a general sense what deserves to be linked.

Within wiki content, auto-links should be thought of more like an assist tool, to help find terms that should be linked, rather than the main mechanism by which all the content is linked. Remember: a user can disable them -- if all the content is only auto-linked, then a user with auto-links off won't be able to navigate the wiki effectively!

As for resource hog/recursion problem: This could be made into an option for "how deep to go".. Or maybe even be set as a option when editing/creating the template: "[X] Autolink things for this template (warning, can be resource hog)"..

The original intention I can understand, and I think it could be expanded to allow for even more flexible use of the auto-linking..

In the case of e.g. infoboxes, it makes very much sense to autolink items there, as it doesn't usually have much text, but more "listed info"; even if a user has disabled autolinking, we as forum owners should be able to decide that things inside the infobox are a very good "navigation tool" onto the other pages.

If this is "not a bug", maybe we could make it into a "suggestion" for allowing for more aggressive autlinking inside templates, either:
1. Via an on-template-basis through template setting, or
2. As a "how-deep-to-recurse-while-autolinking-templates"-option in the ACO..

That way forum owners can decide how it should work, rather than being limited to the original intent of the autolinking, which TBH is a bit lacking now

I am honestly not even sure if the proposal is technically feasible, due to potential problems modifying the template contents before processing template codes like IF, and possible problems where modifications to the text might be flagged as false positives (that might be impossible to get around) in some of the template security measures.

As for performance, it's not a question solely of template depth. There is actually a hard limit of 15 templates depth before it starts rendering deeper templates as empty. But you can place 100 or 1000 template uses at the same depth (think of the main page text referencing various templates 1000 times -- I have actually seen some customers do this), so you not only need to process the main page text for auto-links, but then each of those 1000 templates. Then think of that happening at each level 15 layers deep in each of the 1000 templates. You can potentially call the autolinker over 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 ,000 times. Some optimizations would also need to be conceived for templates to make this harder. This is a general problem with templates, and a reason why there are so many security measures in place around them.

But I have debugged some sites where the auto-linker takes upwards of 1 second to run once. It would be a small task for even unintentional wiki edits to cause massive numbers of wiki pages to go down because the autolinker has pushed them to trigger those security measures.

Because of these issues, the proposal could not be just #1, but probably a combination of #1+2. But there would probably need to be a third element in there that limits the number of templates on a given depth that are processed.

Yeah I guess it is a problem if some customer misuses it..
But if e.g. enabled on an on-template-basis (off by default ofc), customer would them self decide, and maybe some disclaimer that it shouldn't be used for templates that are included many times on a page? In our case, the infoboxes are included max 1 time per page..


Hmm also wondering, could something like an async job go through pages and update things inside specified templates to add wiki-tags if the autolinker finds something matching? That way we wouldn't need to do it during runtime?

I don't generally like the idea of some jobs potentially breaking content, but it would be useful if some tool could suggest or add those tags automagically...

@pegasus any update on this?

If e.g. the [template] had an "|autolink=force/enabled"-parameter we could trigger, we could limit this to only happen on the infobox template (we anyway only include max 3 templates total on a page but...)

and then in combination with an admin setting to not go deeper than X levels (default=1) when autolinking in templates..

That would allow us to specify that the infobox should be auto-linked, while limiting the cases where someone might break their site...

ofc there needs to be "warnings" in both the Special:WikiCodeList page and admin control panel that those settings can break things.. And maybe put some hard limit to not go deeper than 3 levels at any point...