Clarify what the categories mean in the bug report forum

jim_m_58 said:

It's been that way for years.  For me, with win11 and chrome, the color changes when it's seen as a url

Yes, we can all see that flocsy’s url was posted as plain text instead of a clickable link. The question is: why? Do you really think flocsy doesn’t know what a clickable link is? Or that anybody here hasn’t noticed that clickable links are styled differently than plain text (e.g. different colour and/or underline)? 

You’ve been on the forums for longer than flocsy, haven’t you noticed that the forum *usually* automatically converts plain text urls to clickable links? So if someone posts something that looks like it was supposed to be a clickable link, but it’s plain text, that suggests it’s a forum bug, as opposed to the poster thinking that plain text should work just like a clickable link.

I think you're missing the part where flocsy's url is abbreviated [part of it was replaced with "..."], meaning:

- flocsy originally posted a url as plain text, and the forum converted it to a clickable link, with the link text as an abbreviated form of the original url

- after flocsy submitted his comment, the forum erroneously de-linkified the link, replacing it with the link text, which makes it useless [since the link text is an abbreviated form of the original url, meaning the original url is gone]

Or do you think flocsy abbreviated his own URL to make it useless?

forums.garmin.com/.../forum-bug-a-category-is-required-for-this-ideation

Does ^ this look like a valid URL to you? No, it's a product of a forum bug.

To be fair, this is one of the rarer forum bugs [although I think it's probably been around forever].

I already made a post about this bug:

[https://forums.garmin.com/developer/connect-iq/f/forum-about-the-forum/404407/bare-url-text-abbreviated-but-not-converted-into-a-link-in-the-ciq-bug-reports-forum-resulting-in-the-loss-of-the-original-url]

jim_m_58 said:

For me, with win11 and chrome, the color changes when it's seen as a url

I think you mean a link, not a url. A URL is just a reference to a network location - it's not necessarily a clickable link.

e.g. 

https://www.google.com

See, right there ^ is an example of a URL as plain text, not a link. Try clicking on it - you can't. We can also write a URL down on a piece of paper or speak a URL out loud - also not the same as a clickable link.

Strictly speaking, a link is a clickable element [in HTML, an <A> element] that has both link text to be displayed to the user and a link target [usually, but not always, a URL] which specifies the location that's opened when you click on it.

Sometimes the link text and link target are the same, but often they are not.

For example, this forum often abbreviates the link text for links created from a bare URL [originally plain text], so that the link text doesn't match the link target anymore. That's exactly what happened to flocsy above, except that links were also de-linkified by the forum [changed back to plain text].

Yes, colloquially speaking, sometimes people will say "link" when they mean "url". To me that's a lot more defendable than saying "url" when you mean [clickable] link. Since you talked about the color changing, it's clear you meant a clickable link.

And if you meant that win11 and chrome will automatically change a bare url to a clickable link in all cases, that's not true either. Obviously chrome isn't changing the google url above to a clickable link, for example.

Notepad in Win11 doesn't do so either:

(Yes, there are many cases where OSs and apps will automatically change plain text URLs to clickable links, but it's not a hard and fast rule).

flocsy🤠 said:

When I add a new line after the url then it works

You can also try surrounding the plain text url (or link) with square brackets, which usually prevents the forum from abbreviating / mangling it. (Do not do this in the bug report forum, as it has the opposite effect of mangling your url/link and, sometimes, the text that follows it)

When I want to post a link without abbreviating its URL:

- I paste the URL

- I surround the URL with square brackets

- I use CMD/CTRL-K to manually linkify it (as the square brackets usually also prevent linkification)

[https://forums.garmin.com/developer/connect-iq/f/forum-about-the-forum/363276/forum-bug-a-category-is-required-for-this-ideation]

(Another approach is to trigger linkification - e.g. by pressing space - before adding square brackets, so you don't have to manually create the link)

forums.garmin.com/.../forum-bug-a-category-is-required-for-this-ideation

^ Interestingly the bug didn't bite me here. I just pasted the same url (as plain text), without any trailing newline, and it was linkified and abbreviated, without subsequent de-linkification.

What could've happened is that the forum has been intermittently down for the past hour or so, so maybe the forum decided to die just as flocsy's comment was submitted, right in the middle of the linkification/abbreviation process?

So for anyone else who's reading along:

- If you post a bare url (url as plain text) in the forum, the forum will convert it to a real clickable link either while you're editing the post or after you submit it

- when the forum converts a url to a clickable link, sometimes it likes use an abbreviated form of the url as the link text

- sometimes the forum will de-linkify a link that it previously created, after the post was submitted, meaning the link is replaced with the link text. In this case, if it had used the abbreviated url as the link text, then the original url has obviously been lost and the new url is useless

I will point out that when the forum platform was changed years ago, all links were de-linkified (replaced with their link text). Since most or all of the links were similarly abbreviated in the old platform, pretty much every link became useless (unless you could guess the right words to search for, using the abbreviated url). I sure hope this doesn't happen again. (Who am I kidding, we're stuck with this awful forum platform forever.)

Another bug we've all seen is that if you type punctuation such as comma or period after a bare url (url as plain text), the forum will incorrectly include the punctuation as part of the link that it auto-creates. This has caused users to post bad links more than once. Here the workaround is to press space after typing or pasting a bare url, which forces linkification to happen immediately. Then you can press backspace and add the intended punctuation.

Note that modern OSs and apps like iOS and Slack are smart enough to avoid including a trailing comma or period when auto-linkifying a url.

TL;DR the forum auto-linkifies URLs, but does a bad job at it.