Can We Have Automatic URL Generation?

April 19, 2005 2:28 PM

Automatic URL generation within threads would be kinda neat.
posted by craniac to Feature Requests at 2:28 PM (28 comments total)

What do you mean by that?

Turning http://example.com into http://example.com?

Or something else?
posted by mathowie (staff) at 2:50 PM on April 19, 2005

But without auto-generation, you can do really cool stuff like this:

<a href="http://goatse.cx">http://example.com</a>

Ha ha! They think they're going to example.com, but they're going to a real portal instead! It's like totally 1337! (That means, "leet", by the way!)
posted by orthogonality at 3:12 PM on April 19, 2005

Mathowie: yeah, that would be cool, from my lazy user perspective. I'm not sure what headaches it would generate on your end.
posted by craniac at 3:32 PM on April 19, 2005

Do-it-yourself:

1) Firefox
2) Greasemonkey
3) Linkify script
posted by Plutor at 3:41 PM on April 19, 2005

I don't particularly enjoy reading URLs. If you can go to all the effort of digging up a link, I think you can spend another ten seconds providing some useful hypertext to go with it.
posted by Galvatron at 3:49 PM on April 19, 2005

Also, people often quote URLs without wishing to make them a link. Between the simplicity of making a link manually and the "link" button in the comment box, it hardly seems worth it to fix something that isn't broken.
posted by dg at 4:02 PM on April 19, 2005

Yeah. Needless feature that will surprise/annoy more people than it helps.
posted by cortex at 4:56 PM on April 19, 2005

I don't like the proposed feature, because it violates the Principle of Least Surprise. If for some reason we get this, I beg, beg, beg for an off switch.
posted by majick at 4:58 PM on April 19, 2005

They do this in the Flickr forums and I've always enjoyed just throwing a link in. So, far the world hasnt fallen apart over there.

Then again, its also not a must-have. I just think the objections above are based more on a resistance to change than to anything else.
posted by vacapinta at 5:15 PM on April 19, 2005

I don't like the proposed feature, because it violates the Principle of Least Surprise.

Huh? What would be surprising about it?
posted by Armitage Shanks at 5:33 PM on April 19, 2005

Uh, you can just click the link thing at the bottom or make an HTML link. If that's too hard, you have no business linking.
posted by angry modem at 6:13 PM on April 19, 2005

Coddling the incompetent and the lazy has dragged America to depths in which it lies today. No, I say, no!

On the other hand, coddling the incompetent and the lazy would help speed the eventual final collapse of America, so bring it on! More automatic stuff! More!

I just don't know what to think. Mercy me.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 6:24 PM on April 19, 2005

copy/paste is your friend.
posted by quonsar at 6:52 PM on April 19, 2005

Coddling the incompetent and the lazy has dragged America to depths in which it lies today.

YES
posted by knave at 7:21 PM on April 19, 2005

Well, if you want to weed out the pansies, let's code our posts in 6502 machine code.



I just thought that autolinks made it a tad easier to quickly answer questions in ask.mefi
posted by mecran01 at 8:47 PM on April 19, 2005

The automatic link-making button feature isn't fast enough?
posted by dabitch at 12:21 AM on April 20, 2005

"Huh? What would be surprising about it?"

The text and markup placed into the comment box then differs from what is posted, and that breaks my laziness. MetaFilter already has a few features that do this -- translation of newlines to <br> for example -- but certainly adding more of them doesn't decrease the munging's surprise level.

One of the best things about the MetaFilter system is that the munging is fairly unobtrusive and that markup works as expected. Some of us mere mortals can't be expected to remember the special text processing rules of every textarea we type in, and adding more just makes the problem worse. Having MetaFilter conform pretty closely to standard markup makes it fairly transparent.
posted by majick at 6:38 AM on April 20, 2005

adding more of them doesn't decrease the munging's surprise level

But how often would someone type a string beginning with "http://" and not want to end up with a clickable link? I'd argue virtually never, in which case making the text clickable is a handy default.
posted by Armitage Shanks at 7:32 AM on April 20, 2005

What angry modem said.
posted by soyjoy at 7:53 AM on April 20, 2005

*translates machine code, slowly*
Wha-? Well, fuck you too, mecran01!
posted by graventy at 8:23 AM on April 20, 2005

But how often would someone type a string beginning with "http://" and not want to end up with a clickable link?

5dollan00b: Hey, what's this tubgirl thing everybody keeps talking about?

0ldh4nd65: Here's the URL -- visit at your own risk.

SCENE
posted by gleuschk at 8:50 AM on April 20, 2005

0ldh4nd65: Here's the URL -- visit at your own risk.

disgustingurl.com
posted by Armitage Shanks at 11:10 AM on April 20, 2005

Well, so much for that theory.
posted by Armitage Shanks at 11:11 AM on April 20, 2005

But how often would someone type a string beginning with "http://" and not want to end up with a clickable link?

No Links II -- The Quickening

fishpants: I don't want to link and give him the search engine cred, but this psycho merits discussion for an applicable reason:

fishpants: http://www.websiteinquestion.com

SCENE

The thing is, when people do want to make a link, it's not hard right now. When people don't want to make a link, they goddam well ought not to have one provided for them. Metafilter is not Clippy.
posted by cortex at 2:05 PM on April 20, 2005

Or how about the old explanatory text trick?

"On many systems, a user's web directory can be found at http://www.servername.com/~username"

No sense making that a clickable link.
posted by nebulawindphone at 4:12 PM on April 20, 2005

Heh. When I first posted I almost added: "Undoubtedly, people will chime in now with the rare and unique cases where they dont want the link generated"

Also, for those people who point out the -link- button. Those of us on Safari don't have it.
posted by vacapinta at 5:48 PM on April 20, 2005

What if linky-linky were configurable in the user profile? Then those that wanted to post in 6502 assembly language could, and the rest of us who all have AOL accounts and japanese robot-bidets could have auto-generation?
posted by mecran01 at 12:12 PM on April 21, 2005

Yeah, that automatic linkmaking button would solve all my problems if it showed up in goddamned Safari.
posted by nanojath at 12:21 AM on April 25, 2005