When Campaign #46 went live, we slipped in a little feature. I'd coded these a long time ago but never enabled them because I didn't get a chance to test them. While I was waiting on the scoring processing for today's campaign reset I decided to run my little test battery. Chat shortcuts are 5 letter codes you can type into a chat message that the server will swap out for meaningful information. Each starts with a '$' symbol followed by a four character "subtitution name"

    $orig
    $targ
       Are replaced with the name of your mission's origin or target respectively.
    $lead
       Is replaced with the callsign of your mission's current leader.
    $unit
       Is replaced with the short form of your current brigade, e.g. 1.Division/1.Brigade
    $miss
       Is replaced with your "mission" name, which is the same as $unit/$miss... E.g. 1.Division/1.Brigade/KFS1

These substitutions occur as soon as your message is received by the host, which means you can do things like:

    /own $orig
       Reports the current /own status of your origin rather than having to type, e.g. "/own Bergen Op Zoom"
    /m $lead Approve my contacts!
       Asks your mission leader an obvious question.
    /r $miss
       Tells the last person to send you a message which brigade and mission you are on.
    /1 I'm on $lead's mission in $unit attacking $targ but we haven't left $orig yet

We're already considering a few, extra, simple additions such as "$town" (my current town) and "$hcid" (the 'id' name for your unit for use by OICs and HCs).