prepending "http://" was necessary because too many users forgot that (which lead to a bunch of broken links) - but maybe we should change that so that the check is done within rendering-time. anyway, afaik wortwerkstatt (and the thread in help.antville.org), this should work differently: a link called "email" (and not the user's name) which links to the email-address of the author. now we could add the following new attribute: <% story.author as="link" to="email" %>, but this wouldn't work exactly the same way (because it would still display the username instead of the standard text).

I think that using the url-field interchangeably would confuse many (most) people, and it would be more consistent to do it like Robert said. using the name of the author as link is fine & more fitting with the general look&feel of antville than my original idea.

depends on how we label the field. If we say "email or url to display on postings (leave empty if you wish)", it wouldn't be too confusing. We would check for ":" and "@" and add the necessary "http://" or "mailto:" if necessary (robert, I don't think it's an issue of create-time vs. runtime, it's just that we should make our checks smarter).

The reason why I promote taking this slightly more complex route is that it puts the power on what information to display where I think it belongs, and that is in the hand of users, not site owners.

hns, doing it that way would mean that you can have EITHER an url OR an email for a user. 't would be much more nicer to have both!

we'd have to add options in the profile page to let users decide whether url and email should be exposed. I agree that this (i.e. adding two checkboxes to the profile page) would probably be easier than what I proposed before.

Also, if you want both url and email address to be displayed, you do need to set the anchor text of the link/email to something different than the author's name, since having the author's name twice, once with url and once with email address, would be confusing (to put it mildly).

but you are right. Using the mail-link for storyauthors & the url-link for commentauthors wouldn't make sense to anyone other than me, myself & I ...

:)