Malformed URLs get "fixed" in a weird way.

July 22, 2012 7:51 PM

I've noticed that links that are incorrectly written seem to lead back to the thread rather than to the (usually easily guessable) URL. Is it possible to modify the behavior to enable the links to (usually) point to the right place?

I was just reading an Ask MeFi thread today in which someone had attempted to provide a link to a possible solution. This was marked as the best answer, but when I click on the link, it just links me back into the thread. This is because "http://ask.metafilter.com/220524/" has been prepended onto the ("www.amazon.com") link.

This took me back to my comic attempts in this thread to get my link right.

I'm not sure, but I suspect that this is triggered by leaving off the "http://" when one provides a link. If this is the case, wouldn't it be better to assume that the poster means "http://" rather than "http://ask.metafilter.com/220524/"? Or is this some quirk of Firefox that no one else sees?

Carefully previewed to make sure that I didn't screw up any links.

posted by Betelgeuse to Bugs at 7:51 PM (2 comments total)

This was recently asked and rejected.
posted by brainmouse at 7:56 PM on July 22, 2012

Yeah the links aren't getting fixed they're just getting the root URL from the page you're on. pb talks about this in the thread brainmouse links to. You can flag the errors as HTML error and we'll go fix them. Right now we haven't hit upon a way to repair these that doesn't introduce other problems. Since that thread is still open I'm going to close this one up but feel free to comment in that thread as any of the commenters will see it in their recent activity.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 8:00 PM on July 22, 2012