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Consider this more of an FYI for anyone using the Auto Linking plugin, and a suggestion to edit the Help text on that admin pane...

I panicked when our forums imploded this morning with numerous preg_replace() warnings. Then I read the alert more closely and realized it must be related to the keywords I had just added for auto-linking: (CCRT/CCRP)

Thinking the parentheses were causing problems I removed those, unnecessary to link anyway. The Warning persisted, until I removed the slash. Changing the keyphrase to "CCRT or CCRP" (sans quotes) did the trick.

So, this got me thinking. There are obviously certain characters not allowable in keywords for the Auto Linking plugin. So I checked the Help text in the SP Auto Linking admin and there is no such list.

The easiest way to address this seems to simply edit the the Auto Linking details and/or Help text by adding a list of characters that users should not include in their keywords.

For now, out of curiosity, what might those characters be?

While I was editing the keywords I noticed the Case Sensitive details. It looks like we can now override case sensitivity with a % symbol. Cool! I don't recall seeing that before, as we had to create multiple variations of certain phrases (upper and lower case) to get them all auto linking. But I soon realized the whole phrase should be prefixed with % - not just the particular word within the phrase.

So, perhaps the edited details might include something like:

Keywords list - words to be replaced in post:

Enter keywords one per line - there must be a corresponding entry in replacement urls to right.

Keywords can be a single word or a multi-word string to be matched in post content. See Help text for list of disallowed characters.

Replacements are case-sensitive. For case insensitive replacements prefix word or phrase with a % symbol.

Hope this helps anyone researching that scary preg_replace warning. Gotta love it when the fix is as simple as this!