Disabled comment links in favorites?

January 29, 2008 12:54 PM

Why do comments that have been favorited show up with all links disabled? Are there any plans to change this behavior in the future?

I use favorites the way suggested in the FAQ- as a bookmark system. About half the times I favorite a comment it's to save a link posted by the commenter, the same as when I favorite a post. So why do links in posts work, but not in comments? I apologize if this question has been asked before, I re-read the FAQ and searched for several different relevant phrases, but could find no mention of the fact that comment links are disabled on the favorites page. If this has been answered before, I would appreciate if you would link me in the appropriate direction.

posted by nzero to MetaFilter-related at 12:54 PM (14 comments total)

It's actually a problem of html-stripping in excerpted comments. If a comment is bigger than the allowable size for the favorites list page, we automatically shorten it to the first n characters or so.

But if we just chopped the comment of at the nth character, we might be cutting it off with an html tag open and unclosed—and the rest of the page would be bold, or italic, or a link, etc.

So if a comment needs excerpting to get it down to size, we strip all the html out first to avoid unclosed tags, and then cut it down to size, safe from html-related breakage.
posted by cortex at 1:02 PM on January 29

That makes sense.

I haven't noticed any favorited comments with links though, so am I correct in concluding that you strip out html regardless of whether you're excerpting the comment?
posted by nzero at 1:06 PM on January 29

(Personally I'd rather see some of my links than none of them)
posted by nzero at 1:07 PM on January 29

am I correct in concluding that you strip out html regardless of whether you're excerpting the comment?

Interesting question. Maybe? Let's do a test!
posted by cortex at 1:11 PM on January 29

I think Music is keen.
posted by cortex at 1:11 PM on January 29 [1 favorite]

By gum, it looks like we are stripping 'em regardless of comment size. If that's an easy fix, I wouldn't be surprised if pb changes that; I can't see any particular reason not to.

As far as just stripping the html after the excerpt, doing that is actually a lot more wonky than just stripping outright—you have to account for the length of the non-displaying href info when you're deciding how much to cut, and then you have to do a tag-closing pass as well in case there's any other incidental html tags sitting open. Likely not worth the extra effort, basically.
posted by cortex at 1:14 PM on January 29

We have a new version of that page on the way today, and I'll add links back into comments if we're not excerpting the comment. That's how the user activity comments page works now.
posted by pb at 1:18 PM on January 29 [1 favorite]

Thanks for the responses. That'd be a really welcome change. It's not that it's a big deal to click the comment first to get the link, the problem is that when I peruse my favorited comments, it's not always, or even usually, obvious which ones had links and which ones didn't. Sometimes links are embedded cleverly in clever comments, and I really don't want to click every single comment to check for a link. Even just adding a note at the end of the comment saying "[links removed]" to indicate that it had been modified would be swell.
posted by nzero at 1:23 PM on January 29

Are there any plans to change this behavior in the future?

I say make 'em sit in the corner and think about it for awhile...sorry
posted by wafaa at 2:33 PM on January 29

Stripping html is so un-politically correct. I believe the term in use nowadays is exotic-dancing html.
posted by quin at 3:13 PM on January 29

EXOTIC DANCE MINE
posted by cortex at 3:29 PM on January 29

Any possibility we could keep italics, too? Since they're so often used to quote a previous commenter, I often see excerpted favorites and wonder what it was about the comment I liked. Special bonus points and laudanumatoriness if we could -skip- the italics in the except and just show the first bit of un-italicized text.
posted by anotherpanacea at 7:22 PM on January 29

Yep, italics are in there. I don't think we could ever skip italicized text because we have no way of knowing what's a quote and what's italicized for emphasis.
posted by pb at 7:47 PM on January 29

I believe the term in use nowadays is exotic-dancing html.

While I was reaching for my drink I completely totally by accident barely even touched the html, and pb broke my fingers.


Except for the one I'm typing this comment with.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 11:15 PM on January 29