Preventing mistakes in URLs

February 7, 2005 8:42 AM

The person posting this today seems to have made similar mistakes in links as the person who posted this five days ago. Just wondering if the mistakes can be identified and better avoided.
posted by mediareport to Bugs at 8:42 AM (29 comments total)

Check the mangled urls of the last three links of both posts.
posted by mediareport at 8:44 AM on February 7, 2005

i've been waiting for a moment to ask: is there a guide to posting? not "what makes a good post," but: how to link, how to bold, how to make small, how to quote another poster, etc...
posted by nequalsone at 8:50 AM on February 7, 2005

And if below your comment box there are only options for "bold" "italic" and "link" how do you add other options like "strikethrough" and smaller font size?
posted by mlis at 9:01 AM on February 7, 2005

Clicking on all my links on preview to make sure they work does it for me. But, yeah, a link to a 'posting how-to' would be nice. If you've never written HTML, formatting fancy posts and comments can be intimidating.
posted by driveler at 9:07 AM on February 7, 2005

Metafilter uses a subset of regular HTML MLIS. Most tags that you can code on pages you can make appear in comments with some exceptions like the marquee tags. That's how people get the different fonts and images.
posted by Mitheral at 9:19 AM on February 7, 2005

It's HTML, try google. Or select "view source" in the browser of your choice to learn by example.
posted by mzurer at 9:19 AM on February 7, 2005

mzurer's link covers all the basics, nequalsone and MLIS. There are tons of other sites, too, it's the easiest thing in the world to get a beginning grip on.

Now, back to the question at hand. goofyfoot claimed "everything worked on preview," for what that's worth. Are the posters just being careless? If so, can mangled links be prevented?
posted by mediareport at 9:28 AM on February 7, 2005

the web is constructed of html, is chockablock full of html information which is published in html with viewable html source. that this continues to be overlooked by people just blows my mind.
posted by quonsar at 9:30 AM on February 7, 2005

Lots of things blow your mind, quonsar... You must have very little left.
posted by taz at 9:44 AM on February 7, 2005

goofyfoot claimed "everything worked on preview," for what that's worth.

I think he's mistaken.

Are the posters just being careless?

That would be my guess.

If so, can mangled links be prevented?

Do you mean "Can the MetaFilter input be made more foolproof"? Probably it could, but at what cost? The current system has been used to successfully post thousands of links over the last five years. Any change that automatically fixed goofyfoot's error would likely break something else (an ftp:// link, for example).

In other words, it ain't broke so please don't fix it.
posted by timeistight at 10:08 AM on February 7, 2005

The mangled links seem to me to be a product of using a text editor such as Word to compose the post. The text editor changes the quotes in the anchor tags to fancy-quotes, breaking the link.

Of course the obvious solution is to double-check all your links on preview. The other solution is to not use a text editor that tries to think for you.
posted by neckro23 at 10:17 AM on February 7, 2005

Taz gets the snap o' the morning.

But yeah, you want to know how to code a little? Do a little research. I always find that the folks at Mandarin Design have lots of good info.
posted by fenriq at 10:30 AM on February 7, 2005

It's that they are using Word or something to compose posts. Those links all have curly quotes in them instead of normal ascii. I'll continue to search in vain for a culry word smart quote killer in the meantime.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 10:32 AM on February 7, 2005

Thanks, Matt and neckro23. Given that the site has a ton of new and excited users, maybe a prominent statement on the posting page would be a relatively cost-free thing to try? E.g., "If this is your first post, please read the guidelines and remember to check all links in preview before posting."

It's not fool-proof, I know, but it'll almost certainly help train some folks more quickly. Or alternatively, can there be a more obvious warning to the poster when a URL with smart quotes (or that's otherwise mangled) is about to be posted? Would it be a large drain on the server to flag smart quotes in links while automatically closing open tags, say?
posted by mediareport at 10:58 AM on February 7, 2005

You must have very little left.

taz, you have a gift for understatement!
posted by quonsar at 11:41 AM on February 7, 2005

May I piggyback on this post? Yeah, like I need permission.

More than once I've seen something like the following exchange in a thread:

"You should have noted that your link is registration-required."

"Sorry, I didn't realize it was registration-required. I [checked the 'remember me on future visits' box|have a BugMeNot plugin|some other mechanism that makes it appear to me that registration is not required on a registration-required site]"

Is there some way, short of deleting all cookies to a site, that one can check whether registration will be required of someone visiting a given page/site for the first time?
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 12:07 PM on February 7, 2005

Devils: I usually load up whatever I want to check in a different browser, IE or Lynx or Opera or something. Works for me. Of course, not everyone necessarily has 4 browsers installed :)
posted by JZig at 12:55 PM on February 7, 2005

Is there some way, short of deleting all cookies to a site, that one can check whether registration will be required of someone visiting a given page/site for the first time?

An alternative (not necessarily better) to using a different browser is to use a different logon (user name, account, whatever). In Windows XP, if you have administrative privileges (the default), you can create an account via the Control Panel (User Accounts applet). Maybe something like "Registration Test Account"? And then use the Switch User function (instead of logging off) to switch to that account for testing. (Cookies are stored by user/account, rather than in one place for everyone on the PC.)

I assume that something equivalent exists in the Mac world.
posted by WestCoaster at 1:04 PM on February 7, 2005

quonsar, mzurer, et al.: yes, the world wide web is published in html, but many message boards use idiosyncratic markup that, for example, uses square brackets instead of angle brackets which is then translated into html server side. looking at the "source" (i.e. "html produced by the server") won't tell you what input created it...

so, the answer is "most html will just work"?

do some people have "bold," "italic," and "link" below their comment box, as MLIS suggests? i just have "preview" and "spell check." (safari on mac osx).
posted by nequalsone at 1:20 PM on February 7, 2005

It's that they are using Word or something to compose posts. Those links all have curly quotes in them instead of normal ascii. I'll continue to search in vain for a culry word smart quote killer in the meantime.

Why do you need to search for it?

In java the code would be:
String a = comment;
a = a.replaceAll('“','\"');
a = a.replaceAll('”','\"');

In other words, just scan for those utf characters, and replace them.
posted by delmoi at 1:47 PM on February 7, 2005

nequalsone
B I Link should be in a little white box on the right side under your comment box.
posted by Cranberry at 1:47 PM on February 7, 2005

thanks Cranberry, I guess I will fire up another browser to see what MetaFilter should look like.
posted by nequalsone at 1:51 PM on February 7, 2005

hmmm. someone may or may not be interested to know that the bold, italic, and link buttons appear in netscape 7.1 for osx but not in safari 1.2.2 or ie 5.2.
posted by nequalsone at 2:24 PM on February 7, 2005

Those buttons don't work in Safari or Mac IE anyway, so they are conveniently hidden so you don't try to click them.

Just type the HTML, it's easier and faster anyway.
posted by kindall at 2:37 PM on February 7, 2005

I second mediareport's suggestion for a little note below the box saying: "If this is your first post, please read the guidelines and remember to check all links in preview before posting." Also, perhaps: "This box accepts HTML." "HTML" could link to a wiki page listing the acceptable HTML markup. Or just having the wiki page could help someone looking for this, or at least mentioning in the new member signup info, "MetaFilter comments can include the following HTML markup:..." Maybe I'm really dense, but this wasn't obvious to me and I wasn't able to find the information anywhere on the site or the wiki.
posted by nequalsone at 8:02 AM on February 8, 2005

Sorry folks.. I did check the links but through Word unfortunately. The whole fancy quotes thing never occured to me... I'll be more careful next time...
posted by drpynchon at 10:18 AM on February 8, 2005

nequalsone: A kind member had previously emailed me a number of CSS resources (I did not realize you needed CSS to add functions to comment box). Email me and I will send them to you.
posted by mlis at 10:54 AM on February 8, 2005

Also thank you Mitheral, mediareport, taz, mzurer & fenriq!
posted by mlis at 11:03 AM on February 8, 2005

I just assumed the board didn't allow HTML since many don't and I just didn't know how to get started and then people mentioned widgets and I didn't have any widgets and I thought that was a problem but then I took a deep breath. And I remembered HTML is better than widgets. And it was OK... Thanks MLIS.
posted by nequalsone at 2:45 PM on February 8, 2005