FastComments #hashtags provide a way for a user to tag their comment as relevant to a particular topic or group. Additionally, hashtags can be used to link to other pages or documents.

For example, if desired, a customer hosting an online video review site could pre-populate a hashtag for each video, and define each hashtag as linking to the appropriate review page for that video. In this way, when someone clicks on #awesomevideo in a comment, they go to https://example.com/awesome-video/reviews instead of viewing all comments with the #awesomevideo tag.

Populating Autocomplete

HashTags can be populated in two ways.

First, by default users can type the # symbol and some text - and if there are existing hashtags an autocomplete UI will be shown.

If a user enters new hashtag, unless disabled, the hashtag will automatically be created and highlighted.

The second way is to manually define each hashtag. This is covered in this document.

Use Cases

HashTags are useful for members of the community to navigate to find relevant discussions. They are also useful to tag relevant pieces of information, as links, which can be defined via our API. For example, hashtags could be used to tag:

• Tickets in a ticketing system.
• Documents or Pages in CRM.
• Files.

The regex for hashtags is /\B#[a-z0-9_-]+/gi - where the # can be customized upon request.

This means that hashtags allow letters, numbers, underscores (_), and dashes (-). They cannot contain periods (.) or spaces ( ).

Upon request, symbols other than # can be used.

Different tag symbols can be used to link to different pieces of content. For example, the API could be used to define hashtags with the # symbol as topic items, but also define entries such as ~document_one and ~document_two. In this scenario, users could use hashtags as well as custom tags to point to other documents.

By default, FastComments allows your users to create hashtags, building the hashtags and adding to autocomplete over time.

Banned users cannot add new hashtags even if automatic hashtag creation is enabled.

However, it is possible to pre-define the set of hashtags via the API. Note that if adding many hashtags, there is a bulk-add API available.

Pre-Populated and Automatically-Created hashtags contribute to the same dataset and both will end up in the hashtag autocomplete.

By default, clicking a hashtag opens a view with a list of comments with the hashtag. However, we can change this to link to an external piece of content for each hashtag.

This can be done when adding hashtags via the API. When we add a hashtag via the API it is possible to define a URL for each tag.

When hashtags are added via the API, or when users enter new hashtags, they are added to a central datastore.

Upon entering a trigger keyword (# is the default), and a character, the system will begin searching for relevant hashtags that start with the same text and show them as suggestions. These results are sorted alphabetically.

Same with @mentions, the keyboard can be used to select an item from the autocomplete menu.