Suggestion: Glossary or Word Replacement Option

[Hawk]

I hope this is posted in the right place. I love this forum. I know 1st hand the hard work that goes into such an undertaking so I am hesitant to make suggestions of more that you could consider. I have been the Administrator of another patient advocacy forum (not cancer) for 15 years. I found a feature that is extremely helpful to us. The problem might be that we use SimpleMachine Forum software rather than vBulletin.

The feature is a glossary that you can build. Any word or abbreviation you put in the glossary is then automatically highlighted in every member's post. When you mouse over the highlighted word or abbreviation, a pop-up bubble shows the glossary definition. Such a feature adds considerably to readability. It especially changes what often looks like cryptic jargon to new members into valuable information to quickly bring them up to speed.

Another feature that can be used instead of or along with a glossary is the replace function of censored words. Our forum censors certain profanity. The profane words are replaced with asterisks or other words. What we often do however is enter abbreviations in as censored words and replace them with the entire word. For instance, if a member types "BCR" in a post, it could automatically be replaced with "biochemical recurrence". This not only helps the reader understand member posts but it ultimately helps your Google ranking because when someone searches "biochemical reaccurance" with Google, your forum ranks higher because it has many instances of that term instead of BCR. "BCR" of course would not rank the forum for searches on Biochemical Reoccurance.

With or without these features you have a great forum. I am willing to some of the work should you decide to add a glossary feature or a censored word replacement feature. These features might reside on vBulletin under Admin options or could possibly be added. I am not sure about that since we use a different platform as I stated earlier.

Thank you and feel free to delete this post if it is not useful.

Hawk
PS: Feel free to contact me if you have any questions

[lisa1962]

Hello Hawk

We appreciate your suggestion. While I can not speak on behalf of the technology of this particular software, I can offer my thoughts as an Admin of this site.

I believe "highlighting" each and every abbreviation can get confusing and take away from one's reason for being here, support of others going through a similar diagnosis or for their caregivers and loved ones.

Since you are a valued member to our Prostrate Forum, there is a "sticky" within that particular forum which is copied below.

https://www.cancerforums.net/threads...-abbreviations

Mostly, people want things explained to them without reading through medical lingo. That is just my opinion and while it may relate more towards other cancer types , possibly Prostrate Cancer is the exception.

Thank you again for bringing this matter up for discussion. Possibly in the future it may be a viable option but I think for now, we will have to leave it aside for the time being.