There was a post that used to be here about boston.com hyperlinking on its web pages. I pulled it down after I noticed it getting linked to from a few pages. Seeing people link to it made me think twice about what I said. It made some speculations on other peoples thoughts and actions that I really can’t attest to.
Yes, Boston.com’s CMS has a process that looks for text strings that look URL-ish or email-ish and makes them clicky. It runs over many of the feeds that boston.com has, not just the Boston Globe feed. The default is on, to make the URL clicky, but it easily be turned off if there is a URL that they don’t want linked. There probably isn’t a convenient way differentiating a good link from a bad one. (Well, I did think of one. We could purchase one of those net-nanny-style content filtering firewalls, and the CMS could try to fetch the URL before making it into a link. The problem is that the cost of the software and the man-hours of integrating it with the CMS would probably defeat any cost savings over checking the links by hand.)