If you don't have a protocol, PerlMonks assumes that you are linking by name. So if you, for instance, type in [tilly] then you get something like [link|http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node=tilly|tilly]. The rule "Just put [] around it" is very human friendly, the rest is an outgrowth.

However you tell me that underneath the zIWETHEY system uses node IDs that you plan to make visible. Actually it appears that you have. Well it appears that your system uses the contentid, threadid, and forumid. That allows you to build the id:// protocol, it won't be as nice as PerlMonks' is (because they have but one ID) but [id://879:162:9] could turn into [link|http://z.iwethey.org/forums/render/showContent?contentid=879&threadid=162&forumid=9|Don't forget spouses and SO's]. (With the forum and thread ids being needed only to specify forums and threads that are separate from the current one.)

You aren't convinced? Well suppose a bunch of people around here became fans of Everything 2. Then you might want to make it easy to link there with [every://Cat haters] becoming [link|http://www.everything2.com/?node=Cat+haters|Cat haters]. Of course a [jargon://true hacker] (aka [link|http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/true-hacker.html|true hacker]) might look down his nose at a system like this. But it really does seem to work out pretty well.

Cheers,
Ben