French Car Forum

Shamelessy lifted from the BX Club forum with many thanks to David Rutherford for originally posting this.

There's one thing that makes a PHPbb forum very difficult to read: Posting links that are very long, and hence making the forum extend it's width wider than your screen. This means that in order to read a posting you have to scroll sideways for every line of text. I'm sure people with smaller screens will agree that this is a right pain.

There is a way to avoid this and allow readability, while still posting your link. It's a function built in to the forum software.

Using the example of a link to one of the CXclub forum threads, rather than posting a link like this:

http://www.cxclub.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?t=419

You post the link like this:

A nice green CX

To do that, you type this:
This example obviously isn't that bad, as it's only 50-ish characters long. Many eBay links though are hundreds of characters long and cause the readability problems. I know I'd appreciate it, and I'm sure many others will too, if longer links can be presented like this. It also gives you the opportunity to describe the link which can be helpful if it's not obvious what the link is.

In dead-link Pictures Within Posts[/url] "myglaren" also wrote,

QUOTE
One other thing that does it is posting 'raw' links.

I won't post an example but the likes of http://www.kjhiruhgirnituhiduncidiofjjvbeoiufhuer&%$$... ad infinitum.

It is simple enough to enclose it in an [ url=http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/]APOD[ /url] (deliberately broken) structure that just shows the site name (or anything you chose to put in the description section) and contracts huge urls to maneagable sizes.
and end up with APOD

For anyone not aware, if you hover the cursor over the 'APOD' part of the last sentence, the actual address will be shown in the information bar at the foot of the page. These adresses CAN be spoofed but I would hardly expect such behaviour from any member of the forums here.

They can be redirects to a malicious site.
To guard against being redirected I'd advise using the advanced tools available in Spybot Search & Destroy, get it from Filehippo or Download.com. If you do, get the Secure Shredder along with it - it's all free.
You can lock your homepage, install the Immunizer (to prevent redirects) and also install their Hosts File, also to prevent redirects. Some nice other tools there too, although the anti spyware scanner isn't what it used to be, there are better ones available but that is really the subject of another thread.
UNQUOTE

Oh dear. I really must make an appointment with the opticians

I was busy reading the BX Forum this lunchtime, spotted the thread there, posted it here and completely forgot that myglaren had already done it. Doh.

That'll teach me to engage brain before posting in future

It's good that it's now got its own separate sticky, and besides it's worth saying twice.

I know that I am in "Grannies Sucking Eggs" territory here but can I just alert anyone who is not already aware that links are not always what they appear to be. Especially the likes of Google Images.

Even raw links can be doctored to masquerade as something completely different.

These are almost always links to phishing sites so should not be taken lightly.

While I am sure that non of the members of the forum would knowingly post malicious links, they can appear on sites linked to in all innocence. There are several hundred 'respected' sites infected with a recent Kraken botnet that is worse than the infamous Storm virus.

If you hover your cursor over the links, the real address will appear in the infobar at the foot of the browser page (most of them anyway, couldn't say WRT IE) Try it with the Google link

I cant blydi get this link thing to work!!




Paul

Most likely like me at first - I wasn't leaving the first "=" after the "[url"

anyhow this:
Anglesy Citroen

is
[url=http://www.anglesey-citroen.co.uk/]Anglesy Citroen[/url•]

- the "•" is there simply to stop it showing as another shorter link like above

[url=http://www.–––WEB PAGE URL–––/]YOUR TITLE[/url•]

any good for you Paul? The dark red text is the fixed tags that remain
constant like quotes.


Andrew