As designed Unlink doesn't unlink

[Mike]

I eventually realized that this was related to links that looked like URLs. The auto-linking of them is intentional (and I should note that it's done by some browsers automatically in the WYSIWYG editor). If you really need them to not be linked, then the plain tag can be used.

 

[Jim McClain]

Then I am confused as to the meaning of "Unlink."

 

[Mike]

It still unlinks things that don't look like URLs (but are linked).

 

[David Thomas]

So when you link some text and the text doesn't look like a URL, you can "unlink" that. But if you paste a link without make it look like some other text, then it will always link it automatically.

Kind of confusing, but whatever the devs want...

 

[Jim McClain]

I agree David. You'da thunk the Unlink button would produce something like [plain] and [/plain], so it would unlink any kind of URL. But yeah, what you said, it's confusing, but whatever the software developer wants.

Jim

 

[Mikey]

[plain]http://google.com[/plain]

isnt it the same in other softwares where you put [noparse]http://google.com[/noparse] ?

 

[Mike]

I agree David. You'da thunk the Unlink button would produce something like [plain] and [/plain], so it would unlink any kind of URL. But yeah, what you said, it's confusing, but whatever the software developer wants.

Jim

The problem is that it's ambiguous. If I paste a URL in, chances are it's better for everyone if it's linked (I'm not sure what specific cases you wouldn't want it linked?). However, a lot of browsers don't automatically do that. Thus, it's not possible to (easily) know the difference between "don't link me" and "I'm not linked, but should I be?"

If I can figure out some way to resolve the ambiguity, then it's not an option. There's always the "don't automatically parse URLs" option, but I think that option didn't provide very much benefit and in the end just added complexity (and confusion because of the fact that it wasn't stored).

 

[Jim McClain]

I like that forum software creates a link automatically whenever I post a URL. I like it when there is a code that will let me use anchor text for the SEO benefit (I especially like when that is automatic and can be over-ridden by creating my own anchor text). But occasionally I will post URLs only as examples, as I was doing when I discovered this problem. That's why I was confused that an Unlink button didn't actually unlink. If the standard way to unlink is to type in [plain] and [/plain], then maybe having a button that did just that would be nice - maybe call it the Unlink button. If the current unlink button does the same thing [plain] and [/plain] does, then why not just have it do [plain] and [/plain]? It doesn't preclude one from typing it out manually in other places we don't want our BB code to parse.

Maybe I am just confusing an already confusing issue.

Jim