Links in the body of posts

[Kyle Meyer]

Why isn't there auto detection of URLs in the body of posts, and yet there's a naughty word filter? You cats are obviously smart enough to build custom(?) forum software, so for the love of all that is holy and just, please auto-detect URLs in posts and create links. I assume this website is written in Perl (hence the cgi-bin folder in your URLs), so this is a trivial, 5 minute task that would improve the usefulness of this site immensely.

You could even do one better by implementing something like Markdown as the new default forum body markup language, which was even originally implemented in Perl and comes with a BSD (free for commercial use with no attribution) license!

So easy, so much value. Will you do this already?

[Kyle Meyer]

To make this even easier (I really want this implemented), I wrote some javascript that does this for you. Drop it in your main.js file and this will just work, and will have the added bonus of working on old posts as well.

Edit: Hard to paste, so here's a URL:

https://gist.github.com/650b3226131a7c1db493

[Addie Bedford]

Hi Kyle!
We feel your pain. Unfortunately, the forum software is hosted and maintained by a different company. Unless we choose to pay through the nose to tweak anything (even minor things), we have to play by their rules.

We're hoping to change this in the coming year. Until then, thanks for the handy bit of code!
Addie out.

[Kyle Meyer]

Does that mean you're going to add that javascript to the main.js file? Because that would be swell.

[Mike In Socal]

Until we get link detection, I use a keyboard shortcut that automatically inserts the html code for me along with whatever link I have copied to my clipboard. On a Mac, I use TextExpander. I'm sure there's an equivalent tool under Windows.

[Nick Gatel]

On a Mac… I'm sure there's an equivalent tool under Windows.

---

Ha! Maybe.

I use Google Chrome as my browser. Highlight a URL, Right Click, and pick Open Link in a New Window.

The browser also has a built in spell checker.

Oh, I am sure someone will point out some severe security risk in using this browser :)

[Author]

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