EEVblog Electronics Community Forum

Try posting a link to https [colon] //2019 [dot] www [dot] torproject.org/docs/pluggable-transports.html.en#user (obviously replace the [dot]s etc.).

The forum absolutely wrecks it. But not when you click Preview, only when you click Post.

There is probably a search-and-replace rule for converting www.... to links that is causing it.

Yep, its broken, even using the code directive.

Ha, I also tried that. But the replacement doesn't care.

This kind of feature is generally used to enforce rules, e.g. replace all instances of "ass" with "butt". That produces some clbuttic failure modes. 

Testing. Never mind. Cannot find a work-around.

JUST TESTING !!!

Removing the    "http://2019." and just starting with the "www."

www.torproject.org/docs/pluggable-transports.html.en#user

Yep... that worked !!
In fact you can even leave out the "www." part, for most sites these days !!

It works only by coincidence because the server redirects that way but it is not the same url and would not work by default.

The forum absolutely wrecks it.

::sigh:: this forum software leaves a lot to be desired on many fronts. The QA just isn't there.

But not when you click Preview, only when you click Post.

I have found several bugs that only appear in the actual post, but not the preview, which is both absolutely maddening and also inexplicable. Why on earth would they develop two different code paths? That gives them twice as many places for bugs to crop up, and results in outcomes like this bug, where the rendering is not identical. 

Honestly, I hate phpBB with a passion. It suffers from the same affliction so many open source platforms are hobbled by: reliance on plugins for anything beyond barebones functionality. But those plugins are often of awful quality, and then cease to be maintained and break with updates to the platform.

I used to be an admin (as in, super-moderator, not a server admin) on a major Mac forum (60K+ registered users in its heyday), and after its start with UBB (a Perl-based forum that worked well with a few hundred users but didn't scale AT ALL), it moved to vBulletin, an excellent commercial product. It, too, supports plugins, but since it's actually got support and active development, things actually work. Being a Mac forum, there were quite a few web designers among the members, so some were paid to actually code a custom theme and a few custom customizations, which actually work well.

Alas, people seem to invariably reach for open source forum software nowadays, despite the fact that they require immense amounts of babying to keep working well. A false economy IMHO.