Automatic conversion of URL to page title fails after Quick Edit
 

When including a URL to another thread in a post, the URL is automatically converted to the thread's actual page title. Like this...
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/techn...xperience.html

If the post is then edited with Quick Edit, the URL reverts to the URL itself rather than the thread title.

Only using the Advanced editor will make it use the thread title.

I don't think that it used to behave this way a few months ago. Is this a new bug?

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/techn...xperience.html


The NEW FlyerTalk: Helpful Hints, Tips and Suggestions to Enhance Your Experience

These are links. I took out the leading [ and trailing ] to demonstrate the issue concerning bb code. Maybe that is the problem. If using FF Colt 2.4.7 is invaluable for pasting links.


url]http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/technical-issues/310493-new-flyertalk-helpful-hints-tips-suggestions-enhance-your-experience.html[/url


url=http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/technical-issues/310493-new-flyertalk-helpful-hints-tips-suggestions-enhance-your-experience.html]The NEW FlyerTalk: Helpful Hints, Tips and Suggestions to Enhance Your Experience[/url

I realize that I could manually post the thread title, but the whole point of the feature was that we would no longer have to.

If I always use the Advanced editor, my problem is also "solved." However, I've also noticed a moderator and others who have been affected by the same problem when editing posts.

Thanks for bringing this to our attention sc flier. I'm not really sure if this is a recent development or if it always worked the same way, but agree that it is a less than desirable "feature." I'll check with the tech team to see what, if anything, can be done about it.

Testing a link. http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/techn...xperience.html

Edit: blah.

So here's what's happening:

The default behavior of the forum is to NOT change the anchor text to the title.

We use a third-party plug-in to re-write those links when the pages loads. There are two reasons for this. First, it is a better user experience to be able to read the title of the thread before you decide if you want to click on it. Second, it gives more descriptive anchor text so that spiders can better understand the content on the linked page.

When you load a page, vbulletin builds the page with the default behavior. This page is then passed through the plug-in, which re-writes the page with the new behavior. When you use the quick editor, the page doesn't refresh, so it never gets passed through the plug-in. The result is the link in the page following the default behavior. Now, if you refresh the page, the page is re-generated by vbulletin, and properly parsed by the plug-in.

So, the short answer is that only the person who made the edit will see the incorrect anchor text, and only on the page load that the edit was made.

This wouldn't be a "new" bug, and it wouldn't be a bug that we would be able to fix, as the edit function doesn't pass through the required hooks to fix the behavior. Regardless, the user who made the edit probably already knows the topic of the thread that they linked, so the enhanced functionally isn't completely necessary.

Thanks for the explanation. IIRC, editing a post used to always send the user to the Advanced Editor. So this quirk wouldn't have shown up then.

I didn't elaborate on this when I first posted about this issue. Here's what I've discovered:
When a thread is Closed, any links to other FT threads are not re-written to use the thread title. I'm not sure if moderators who have greater privileges to those threads witness the problem. An example of this is in post #22 of the Promos Promos Promos thread in the SPG forum. The link there appears as follows to me:

I believe that this problem is related to closed threads because I recently posted such a link in another thread shortly before it was closed.

The Promos Promos Promos thread is less useful without being able to fully read the thread titles. Obviously, the mods who maintain that thread could solve the problem by manually pasting in the actual thread title. That doesn't solve the problem in other threads such as the one for my post above.