URL Links in Forums Messages

I've seen a few actual clickable URL links in some message posts in these forums, but it seems most are just plain text. I've also noticed there is no forum code for a URL. So, Nick, when you post a message and give it a clickable link, do you edit the post by hand to add the link?

My suggestion would be to add a forum code to create a clickable link, since it seems URLs are posted in quite a few messages. At least five messages that I've last read. It would make it easy for users with questions to provide a clickable link to a screenshot of what problem they're experiencing... It would also make it easy for you, Nick, to add a clickable link to a different forum message or other Gammon Soft web page for reference purposes.

A good idea, if you chose to implement it, would be to have the link open in a new browser window, so the user browsing does not loose their current place while referencing something else.

The forum administrator in this forum script can give certain users (in this case himself hehe) a permission setting to post in html. I'm guessing that's what he used in this case.

I think Nick didn't put it in out of legitimate fears that some may exploit it as a security hole somehow. I do agree tho that having a way to do links in forum codes would be beneficial tho, so perhaps you could set it up something like this:

[URL]http://www.aethiamud.org/iceman[/URL]

Then the forum could interpret it as follows, where $URL is whatever lies between the [URL] and [/URL] tags:

<a href="$URL" target="_blank">$URL</a>

The only risk then would be someone clicking on a link to a page with some harmful/damaging scripts and whatnot. But then again, the same risk exists if someone just copies/pastes the non-html url into his/her browser window.

There may be other problems with it tho that I'm not aware of; you'd have to ask Nick about that hehe :)

Or, just stick it in the message in raw form, like so:

<a href="http://www.muddomain.com/imc/index.php">Mud Domain IMC2</a>

Standard method, anyone who knows HTML should be able to handle that, and as was mentioned, risks are fairly minimal. Someone with a rogue script will always find someplace else to post it.

Opening in a new window ( or tab, for those of us who use tabbed browsers ) is usually the norm too.

I experimented with this a while back, but the problem is that, if you inadvertently have something like:

<a href=" ... blah blah

with no closing tag, the entire rest of the forum posting either disappears, or becomes one huge hyperlink (including other peoples' messages).

To stop this the display routine would need to carefully parse each message, which it doesn't currently do, for speed reasons.

At present, it simply does a "replace all" of "[b]" to "<b>" and so on. This seems to work reasonably well, and you can always post hyperlinks as text, and a quick copy-and-paste lets you follow them.

Nice topic.I think Nick didn't put it in out of legitimate fears that some may exploit it as a security hole somehow. I do agree tho that having a way to do links in forum codes would be beneficial tho, so perhaps you could set it up something like this.Let us more details visit at xxxxxx [spam omitted].

Nice try, Paul.

Another bit of spam bites the dust.

But does it clean goat's blood, Paul?

Yeah, quite right. The goat's blood is the thing that concerns me the most.

BTW spammers get their IP address blocked, so it isn't in your interest to spam this forum.

That IP address seemed to be on a list of blacklisted mail spammers too, strangely enough. ;)

It's amazing how much effort some people go to in order to get their cheesy links posted (and promptly removed)...