Topic Link Detection question

[rob]

Enabling auto-accept on a single word is typically going to yield more trouble than benefit. Especially within RPGs, a single word will quite often find itself used in numerous different combinations with other words. The example here with Dragon and Dragon Knight is but a simple instance of that. Without any real thought, I can come up with likely topic/article names such as "Dragon Slayer", "Order of the Dragon", "Red Dragon", "Dragon Disciple", "Flaming Dragon Inn", etc.

If any of these other names are used in a realm, having the word "dragon" auto-accept is going to cause headaches. Even if we added special handling to avoid auto-accepting "dragon" in a topic who name is a superset (like "dragon knight"), that only solves the problem within those specific topics. Throughout the rest of the realm, problems will ensue. Anywhere that the "Order of the Dragon" is mentioned, such as an NPC that's a member or a scene where the organization is encountered, will end up automatically matching "dragon". So there is really very little point in adding custom handling for the specific situation presented by the OP, as the problem will persist throughout the rest of the realm.

The only way to ensure that "dragon" doesn't get auto-accepted when within another larger term is to configure every other term as auto-accept. So that means "Dragon Knight", "Dragon Slayer", "Order of the Dragon", "Red Dragon", "Dragon Disciple", "Flaming Dragon Inn", and anything else must ALL be configured as auto-accept. If that's done, everything will behave well, since Realm Works does give preference to the longest matching term it can identify.

But setting up everything to be auto-accept is going to be annoying and probably introduce new complications of its own. You'll also need to setup auto-accept on all the plural forms, of course. And it likely ends up just being more trouble than it's worth.

Which is why I started out this post with the assertion that enabling auto-accept on a single word is typically going to yield more trouble than benefit. For multi-word terms, or even obscure one-word terms that aren't going to be used in conjunction with anything else, auto-accept can greatly simplify and speed up operations. But single words that are used commonly in conjunction with others are just not viable candidates for auto-accept.

Hope this helps!

[jflevesque]

Hey everyone,

Thank you for all your responses. I am not sure why, but I had the assumption that having multiple topics that can be matched cause the link detection mechanism to open the conflict windows if multiple matches could be found, even though some would be in auto-accept mode.

I think I'll just have to review how I was using the Auto-Accept feature to prevent such issues.