Preventing URLs from becoming active

[TheSpoon]

When this board was younger, we were encouraged not to post "live" links that would be picked up by search engines, and create links between this site and other sites we might not want to have links with. This used to be done by putting an underscore before the http but the BB software seems to now be too clever for this and is making all my links live and even copying in a full image inline when I used a pintrest link. I tried worked in BBCode directly, but that didn't help.

What's the "done thing" these days please?

 

[Palinurus]

What's the "done thing" these days please?

Hi TheSpoon and welcome back.

Nowadays nobody bothers anymore because current web crawlers treat anything that looks like a link as precisely that and so does the forum software as you rightly observed.

So in this case resistance has been proved futile and obsolete.

 

[Possibility of Being]

Let's see:
.https://www.rt.com/russia/

vs [nothing in front]

Russia news - RT International

Find news on the Russian economy, politics, and wider society, as well as stories from all around the world’s biggest country.

www.rt.com

another one
.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiEFwUVDsng

vs.

So it's still possible if needed. But indeed, it's rarely used.

 

[Mari]

If I put url in icode tags (found above in the menu next to inline spoiler) then it also disables the link.

https://www.sott.net/

 

[mrtn]

I think you shouldn't bother about this:

Personally, I do not advocate deactivating ANY links - unless it is to a site that is defaming us. That's how it started.

Other sites see that we are driving traffic to them. Google sees this. This is a good thing.

I'm not sure how this got so out of hand, but there is no good eason to deactivate MOST links on this forum.

Not any more, anyway.

You can click the 'Scottie said' link from the quote above to see where this was discussed.

 

[Alejo]

Good find mrtn,

And also, sometimes active links and embedding videos and tweets, makes the forum a bit more colorful and convenient to navigate rather than having to copy paste links.

 

[TheSpoon]

OK, active links good. Will leave active. Thanks for the input all.

Interesting that a full stop seems to disable a link but an underscore does not.

.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorem_ipsum

Huh, good to know for when/if I need it.