Message Centre: PLEASE stop converting everything with a full stop in it to a hyperlink

[+barefootjeff]

Just trying to help someone struggling with one of my multis so I tried to send them the formula for calculating GZ from the waypoint answers A..F:

 

SOUTH 33° 25.ABC EAST 151° 18.DEF

 

But MC converts this to SOUTH 33° 25.ABC EAST 151° 18.DEF.

 

How often does someone actually want to include a URL in a message and even if they did, does it really have to be directly clickable?

[+Max and 99]

I noticed that recently too. I didn't like it. 

[+Viajero Perdido]

Been like that forever.  A period followed by anything that isn't a space, or something similarly illogical, turns into a non-working link. 

 

For all its eccentricities, I still love this site and the game.  

 

(* Some asterisks apply.) 

[+thebruce0]

I believe was FB does is when it senses a potential link on the backend it pings what it thinks is the URL before actually creating a link. Or checks for social media card data, or something like that. FB definitely doesn't create anything that "might" be a link into an actual link.  "18.DEF" isn't a url, let alone a valid domain. So yeah, ideally, whoever is sanitizing message text - please update your algorithm to be a little tighter on the interpretation of links. =/

[+dprovan]

We've discussed this before, haven't we? Maybe it was in logs instead of messages? Anyway, yeah, it's silly. But my phone's message app does the same thing, although at least there I can turn the "feature" off. The worst example I ran into was when someone typo'd something reasonable in a text message, something like, "I'll do that.Is that OK?", i.e., leaving out a space at the end of an interior sentence, and "this.is" (or whatever it was) turned out to be a valid web page, so my messaging app "helpfully" put a *preview* of the web page in the message it showed me. The preview was, of course, an ad, simultaneously showing me an ad I didn't want to see *and* making the actual message with the otherwise undetectable typo in it entirely unreadable. I assume people are buying up likely typo host names like that just for that purpose.

 

Anyway, I agree wholeheartedly that it shouldn't be done. Even for the case where someone *does* want to send a URL, it still doesn't actually make any sense to make it clickable. Smartphones have tools to deal with text URLs easily enough, and, on the other hand, it will likely be accidentally clicked more often than it's intentionally clicked.

[+thebruce0]

Also, depending on where that 'preview' is pulled, if it's client-side code doing it then it's your phone now pinging that unintended website with possible tracking. At the very least the fact your IP visited the website is on record. But, at least GC messaging isn't showing preview cards of auto-sensed links.