testing links

[hufflee]

so it's all in the brackets?

lmao. no clue. I'm trying to figure it out myself

[hufflee]

Here's how to link the word "word" to a url:

[url=http://www.example.com]word[/url]

word

yahoo

[hufflee]

word

yahoo

I DID IT!!!!!! go me! I can't believe it took me that many tries!

[sephira]

so it's all in the brackets?

or am i wrong again? and what's this 'parse' business?

[hufflee]

or am i wrong again? and what's this 'parse' business?

I don't know. I ignored it, and just used what you can see in Randall's original post, not what shows up when in the blue quote box when you link to his post.

[hufflee]

I don't know. I ignored it, and just used what you can see in Randall's original post, not what shows up when in the blue quote box when you link to his post.

broken down......

[url=http://www.yahoo.com]yahoo /url]

i deleted the "[" between the word yahoo and the end url symbols so you can see what it should look like without getting the parse stuff. When you put the [ back, what you should see is this

yahoo

the blue word yahoo is actually the link to yahoo.com

[SunflowerP]

or am i wrong again? and what's this 'parse' business?

When someone wants to post an example of how the code will look, without having what they type actually be a link (or a quote, or whatever they're giving an example of), they can put "noparse" code around it.

Randall did that, and you could see the code used to make a link, but not the "noparse" part. When Hufflee tested it the first time, she copypasted from what Randall said as it appeared quoted in the reply box (where all the code is visible) rather than as it appeared in his post, and she missed the opening square bracket, so it got weird.

You're unlikely to need to use it; it's mostly used by those who have a lot of familiarity with BBCode and are explaining it to those who don't.

Here is a link to the help page on posting from our archive board, which has quite a bit of stuff explaining BBCode as it's used on SMF, the forum software we used to use - some of it won't work exactly the same way on VBulletin, but it should help you with the basics. If I have the spoons later, and if I remember, I'll see if I can find a similar thing that's VBulletin-specific. But for the most part, BBCode is BBCode; the differences between customizations for different software are fairly trivial.

"It's all in the brackets" is a pretty good summary of how BBCode works - or any kind of formatting code. The software sees stuff-in-brackets (square brackets for BBCode; HTML uses pointy brackets) and knows that's formatting instruction, not actual text content. (Hence, "noparse"; it tells the software to treat the stuff-in-brackets as if it was text.)

Aha, here are the VBulletin-specific general instructions, and here is the list of BBCodes you can use (and I coulda used that list myself last night, so I'm happy to find it) - I found them via the FAQ tag in the navigation bar at the top of the page (which I think is less useful/obvious than a "help" button or tag, but that might just be me).

If you want me to explain anything better, please do ask - I like explaining this stuff; I'm not a novice to it but I'm not anywhere near as familiar with it as Randall is, and helping others learn to use it is a great way to increase my own familiarity.

Sunflower

[RandallS]

[URL="http://www.yahoo.com"]http://www.yahoo.com]here[/URL]

There are two problems here.

1) You have the URL in quotes. There should not be any quotes.

You repeated the URL.

It should look like:

[URL=http://www.yahoo.com]here[/URL]

Which will look like this to people reading the message:

here

It's Open Bracket, URL=, the url without quotes, close bracket, whatever text you want linked, open bracket, /URL, close bracket

[SunflowerP]

If you want me to explain anything better, please do ask....

You didn't ask, but it did come up in the "Favorite Tarot Deck" thread again, and I said I'd take discussion of it over here, so here it is.

I know the RUNE MYSTERIES(I did it SunfowerP! Yay for me!)

Just so everyone can see the code (so more people can help in case I don't know enough, and so that more people who are BBCode novices can learn from it), I'll use that nifty "noparse" trick that I learned in this thread just now :

[URL="http://www.amazon.com/Rune-Mysteries-Nigel-Jackson/dp/1567184030"][SPECIAL]RUNE MYSTERIES[/SPECIAL][/URL]

The reason that doesn't work right is because of the "special" tags - that code is for linking to "special pages" on TC, and the book you're referring to doesn't have a page on TC (that's also - I think - why it comes out red, not blue; that means the page it's trying to link to doesn't exist).

I'm really curious about this, by the way - in your first test post, you tried both the "s" tag and the "special" tag. That sounds like there's something particular you were expecting one or the other of them to do, and though I've tried and tried, I can't guess what. It might be really helpful to getting this sorted if I/we knew what you were aiming for with that.

Contrary to what Randall said above, the existence of quote marks isn't causing a problem. It looks to me like VBulletin doesn't care if there are quote marks or not (unlike SMF, or IIRC Beehive, both of which would fail to make a link if you put quote marks in).

Test:
[URL=http://sunflowerp.dreamwidth.org/]This link goes to my DW blog[/URL]
This link goes to my DW blog

[URL="http://sunflowerp.dreamwidth.org/"]This link goes to my DW blog[/URL]
This link goes to my DW blog

Randall, I did both of those using the "link" button above the reply box, not by hand - for the first one I removed the quote marks that VBulletin provided, for the second, I left it exactly as VB provided it.

Sunflower

[SunflowerP]

There are two problems here.

1) You have the URL in quotes. There should not be any quotes.

You repeated the URL.

It should look like:

[URL=http://www.yahoo.com]here[/URL]

Which will look like this to people reading the message:

here

It's Open Bracket, URL=, the url without quotes, close bracket, whatever text you want linked, open bracket, /URL, close bracket

I noted in my immediately-previous post that VB provided the quotes and they don't cause problems, then I noticed that this was also true of the second (non)issue, the duplication of the URL.

[URL="http://sunflowerp.dreamwidth.org/"]http://sunflowerp.dreamwidth.org/[/URL] comes out as http://sunflowerp.dreamwidth.org/, which should be a working link.

For those who are putting in their BBCode by hand (which evidently includes you - button? we don't need no steenkin' button! lazy kids these days! get off my e-lawn!), your construction works just fine, like good old-school BBCode should. But evidently VB has customization to its BBCode that makes it more forgiving to those who've been using HTML a lot and forgot which code they were in - and that customization shows up as the default for us lazy kids who use the button.

<examines own birthdate: old> <examines Randall's birthdate: slightly older> <puts down her cane and hobbles off Randall's e-lawn as nimbly and kiddishly as she can manage>

Sunflower, who has run out of spoons and is using silliness as a substitute