eonscat links
Its often useful to be able to point people to a specific plug-in when posting on forums and social media sites. To make this easy, Strange Eons supports a feature called eonscat (“eons cat”) links. It works like this: you add the special marker eonscat: followed by some text that will identify the plug-in(s) you want to point out to readers. Readers select this text, copy it to the clipboard, and switch to (or start) Strange Eons. Strange Eons will notice the special marker on the clipboard, open the plug-in catalogue, and apply the text that follows it to the search filter.
Here is an example:
eonscat:game=AH
If you select this line and copy it to the clipboard, then switch to Strange Eons, it will open the catalogue and list all plug-ins related to the board game Arkham Horror.
Linking to a specific plug-in
Most of the time, you’ll want to point the user to a specific plug-in. The surest way to do this is to use the plug-in’s UUID (Universally Unique ID). Each plug-in is assigned one when it is first created, so Strange Eons can tell them apart.
To find a plug-in’s UUID, open the choose the Toolbox/Manage Plug-ins menu item and select the plug-in in question. Then right click on the plug-in details and ensure that Show Expert Information is checked. This will show some additional fields, including the UUID, which you can then copy and paste. For example, the UUID information in this listing:
would yield the link text eonscat:8e390556-9b88-432b-8f81-3dc9fdc0b72d. And if you copy this text onto the clipboard and switch to Strange Eons, it will indeed offer to install the Pickman’s Portrait Studio plug-in.
Short eonscat links
Using the full UUID will be sure to get you the exact plug-in that you want, but it makes extra work for the reader. You only need to include just enough of the UUID that it only matches one plug-in. The second digit cluster usually works well: the link text eonscat:9b88 will point to exactly the same plug-in as the full link above. The downside of using a short link is that some other plug-in may happen to match it in the future, so there will be more than one result. Your reader can figure out which plug-in you meant based on what you were writing about!