Normal Links
Let's start with normal links copied (or typed?) into a post like this one:
Normally those work just fine, but there are a few characters when included make them incomplete. For example:
The solution is to use the
URL encode equivalent of those characters - like this for the previous example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Party_(United_States)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Party_%28United_States%29
Which should give us a working link to the page:
The characters that seem to be problematic in normal links are:
Problem characters in normal links
ASCII character
URL encode equivalent
Secure Links ( https:// )
Another issue with normal links is that DU3 seems to not like secure
https:// links and converts the web address back to
http:// links. This can be resolved by using the
[link:|] tag - it will retain the
https:// portion of the link.
The [link: | ] Tag
Which brings us to the final issue - the
[link:<web address>|<text>] tag. First thing to verify is that you are including
http:// if the web address does not start with
www. The next thing to check is if you are using any characters that are known to cause issues (the most notable issue being the intended link disappears altogether!). There are two parts to this problem: characters in the web address, and characters in the text.
The [link: | ] Tag (web address)
For characters in the web address, the solution is also to use their URL encode equivalent (same procedure as above, but additional problem characters). The ones that seem to cause issues are:
Problems in [link:<web address>|]
ASCII character
URL encode equivalent
The [link: | ] Tag (text)
For the characters in the text portion causing issues, the easy workaround is to simply reword the text to avoid using the problem characters. If you are really intent on using one of the problem characters, it can be done. The way to get text characters causing issues to show up is to use
HTML entities - these will display the character when posted without the DU3 software seeing it as the character (which would break the link). Known characters causing problems:
Problems in [link:|<text>]
ASCII character
HTML entity equivalent
The drawback to using HTML entities is that you can't submit your final post from the preview screen, you have to hit the back button on your browser to post from the pre-previewed window with the HTML entities still present. Also in order to edit a reply/OP with HTML entities after it is actually posted to the board, they will all have to be edited back in.
Feel free to reply with other problems (or when some of these get fixed) and I will update accordingly
