Truncation of URLs is breaking the links

Discussion about the board itself, forums organization and site bugs.
Alan Baxter
Ambassador
Posts: 1586
Joined: Fri Mar 20, 2009 4:47 am
Location: Colorado, USA

Re: Board Truncating Links

Post by Alan Baxter »

Giorgio Maone wrote:It seems to be a well known phpbb3 issue
The MozillaZine forums don't have this issue, and earlier versions of this board -- I think even after updating to phpbb3 -- didn't have this problem. Do the phpbb forums discuss this relatively new bug? Hasn't phpbb released a fix yet?
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:10.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/10.0
User avatar
therube
Ambassador
Posts: 7924
Joined: Thu Mar 19, 2009 4:17 pm
Location: Maryland USA

Re: Board Truncating Links

Post by therube »

But it seems to only have started recently?


123456789*123456789*123456789*123456789*123456789*12345|<--- 55 chars
http://www.123.xx19/123456789/123456789/123456789/12345

Code: Select all

123456789*123456789*123456789*123456789*123456789*12345|<--- 55 chars
http://www.123.xx19/123456789/123456789/123456789/12345
123456789*123456789*123456789*123456789*123456789*123456789*|<--- 60 chars
http://www.123.xx19/123456789/123456789 ... 123456789/

Code: Select all

123456789*123456789*123456789*123456789*123456789*123456789*|<--- 60 chars
http://www.123.xx19/123456789/123456789/123456789/123456789/

55-characters seems to be the cutoff point.

56 & above are ellipsed, which would be fine, but the actual links are invalidated.

This (the invalidation) does not occur (at least at that point) on mozillaZine, http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic ... #p11701211. (Don't know what version of phpBB they are running?)

Heh. http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=2411843&p=11701211#p11701211
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.19) Gecko/20110420 SeaMonkey/2.0.14 Pinball NoScript FlashGot AdblockPlus
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:12.0a2) Gecko/20120202 Firefox/12.0a2 SeaMonkey/2.9a2
User avatar
therube
Ambassador
Posts: 7924
Joined: Thu Mar 19, 2009 4:17 pm
Location: Maryland USA

Re: Board Truncating Links

Post by therube »

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.19) Gecko/20110420 SeaMonkey/2.0.14 Pinball NoScript FlashGot AdblockPlus
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:12.0a2) Gecko/20120204 Firefox/12.0a2 SeaMonkey/2.9a2
Alan Baxter
Ambassador
Posts: 1586
Joined: Fri Mar 20, 2009 4:47 am
Location: Colorado, USA

Re: Board Truncating Links

Post by Alan Baxter »

therube wrote: (I know this was discussed before but I'm not finding it.)
It's in the Metaforum. I've merged them.
Giorgio Maone wrote:It seems to be a well known phpbb3 issue, and frankly I cannot see any reasonable solution that doesn't involve excessive messing with the original code.
A work-around is suggested here, i.e. wrapping long links in tags.
I can't find any mention of this particular problem on the phpbb site. This problem does not occur in any of the other forums I've tested it in:
https://adblockplus.org/forum/index.php
http://forums.lanik.us/index.php
http://forums.fanboy.co.nz/forums/
http://forums.mozillazine.org/index.php

At this time, it appears to be a problem only on http://forums.informaction.com.

In particular, here's a concise description of the problem which I posted a month ago in http://forums.informaction.com/viewtopi ... 927#p33999.
Alan Baxter wrote: I see it now. Just previewing the message an extra time or quoting it causes the incorrect shortened link to be used instead of the original one....

If I recall correctly, phpBB used to preserve the links correctly when being quoted or previewed a second time. Looks like a new bug to me. I'll provide steps to reproduce right here too:

Steps to reproduce:
Note that this link is clickable, http://info.yahoo.com/privacy/us/yahoo/ ... tails.html
even though it's display is abbreviated to

Code: Select all

http://info.yahoo.com/privacy/us/yahoo/ ... tails.html
Now quote this post with the quote button.
Actual result: The link is mangled and becomes unclickable.
Expected result: The link is still clickable even though it's still displayed in its abbreviated form.

I'm sure this used to work. Even editing a post doesn't work correctly anymore.
Edit: Thanks for reminding me that I can work around the problem in my posts with the [url] tag. It does not address the problem where the link is mangled in someone else's post. therube had to guess what url someone was using in this support topic.
http://forums.informaction.com/viewtopi ... 953#p34953
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:10.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/10.0
User avatar
therube
Ambassador
Posts: 7924
Joined: Thu Mar 19, 2009 4:17 pm
Location: Maryland USA

Re: Truncation of URLs is breaking the links

Post by therube »

Tom wrote: There is a known phpBB issue with long links being truncated, while short ones: www.example.com work fine.
Yes, the workaround is to use URL tags. It's PHP, not this forum, and is a known issue. Don't know if they intend to fix it.
Allan wrote: I can't find any mention of this particular problem on the phpbb site. This problem does not occur in any of the other forums I've tested it in:

http://... (<--- this is not broken, just the way I wrote it ;-))

At this time, it appears to be a problem only on http://forums.informaction.com.
That is the way I see it too, only here, & only relatively recently.
Perhaps it is a general issue with phpBB, but others have implemented work-arounds?
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.19) Gecko/20110420 SeaMonkey/2.0.14 Pinball NoScript FlashGot AdblockPlus
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:14.0) Gecko/20120502 Firefox/14.0a2 SeaMonkey/2.11a2
Post Reply