Important New Forum Update - Feb 2025 changes

[Tunnel King]

This doesn't seem to be the case from my own testing as the auto-embed happened while they weren't on a line by themselves. The same post's raw text without word wrap enabled:

View attachment 492741

yeah, i dislike the decline of forums as a medium as well. the discord-ification of the internet has been a frustrating descent into madness and it leads to information scarcity.

discord tried doing a forums feature so servers could be front-facing and indexable but it never really went anywhere.

a quick rundown of what happened with social groups can be found with these posts: https://forums.terraria.org/index.php?threads/what-if-there-was-%E2%80%9Cclubs%E2%80%9D-or-something-for-tcf-users-to-join.140956/#post-3246005 | https://forums.terraria.org/index.php?threads/what-if-there-was-%E2%80%9Cclubs%E2%80%9D-or-something-for-tcf-users-to-join.140956/#post-3246295

the thread about the change to private messages/conversations can be found here as well: https://forums.terraria.org/index.php?threads/announcement-regarding-changes-to-conversations-private-messages.133894/

The same post, embedded directly into the post:

---

yeah, i dislike the decline of forums as a medium as well. the discord-ification of the internet has been a frustrating descent into madness and it leads to information scarcity.

discord tried doing a forums feature so servers could be front-facing and indexable but it never really went anywhere.

a quick rundown of what happened with social groups can be found with these posts: TCF Suggestion - What if there was “clubs” or something for tcf users to join? | TCF Suggestion - What if there was “clubs” or something for tcf users to join?

the thread about the change to private messages/conversations can be found here as well: Official - Announcement regarding changes to conversations (private messages)

---

And this is how the BBcode of that section looks before I edit anything:


It seems that it just auto-fills the embed now regardless? However, since it can't be changed, I suppose the best way to get around it right now would just be manually assigning text to the link via the URL BBcode.. or just not posting three links in one profile post to begin with. At least this discussion is helpful reference material.

I think we're talking about two different things. When you said 'embed', I thought you meant like the changed feature described in the OP. That actually uses an EMBED BBcode block, I believe.

Substitution of a thread/page title for a link (if available) happened in a previous XF update, some time ago. Prior to that, a URL was just displayed as it was typed/pasted, it may not have even been highlighted way back then.

If a string of text is intended to be clickable as a link, a URL BBcode block is required. There's no way around that, and never has been, as far as I know. If you don't want a URL to be clickable, you can wrap it in a PLAIN BBcode block - everything inside that is displayed exactly as-is.

The character limits on profile posts - whether 1000 or whatever it was before (420?) - is based on the total number of characters in the BBcode version of the post, including all of the BBcode directives. That's the only reliable way to count the length of a message. The Rich Text editor - what most people use, with the menus etc. - inserts BBcode in various ways that can't always be determined. We don't have any way to intervene in how that works. This is also the reason that a character countdown display for posting (showing the number of 'characters' remaining before hitting the limit) can't be implemented in a reasonable fashion.

 

[Mille Marteaux]

I think we're talking about two different things. When you said 'embed', I thought you meant like the changed feature described in the OP. That actually uses an EMBED BBcode block, I believe.

Very plausible. I'm not exactly the best at conveying myself clearly without brute force and directly punching through a few examples in the process

Substitution of a thread/page title for a link (if available) happened in a previous XF update, some time ago. Prior to that, a URL was just displayed as it was typed/pasted, it may not have even been highlighted way back then.

If a string of text is intended to be clickable as a link, a URL BBcode block is required. There's no way around that, and never has been, as far as I know. If you don't want a URL to be clickable, you can wrap it in a PLAIN BBcode block - everything inside that is displayed exactly as-is.

Yeah, this is my first time using a forum for extended periods in years, so this makes a lot of sense.

The behavior I'm used to back when I frequented forums was if you posted a URL without any BBcode at all the forum software would, at most, wrap it with URL tags for you. The fact Xenforo not only does this but also reads the thread's title for you and embeds it as a full string definitely throws me for a loop, but understanding the "why" behind the behavior goes a very long way in being able to work around it.

The character limits on profile posts - whether 1000 or whatever it was before (420?) - is based on the total number of characters in the BBcode version of the post, including all of the BBcode directives. That's the only reliable way to count the length of a message. The Rich Text editor - what most people use, with the menus etc. - inserts BBcode in various ways that can't always be determined. We don't have any way to intervene in how that works. This is also the reason that a character countdown display for posting (showing the number of 'characters' remaining before hitting the limit) can't be implemented in a reasonable fashion.

This also makes a lot of sense. Just tells me when I'm checking something's character count in notepad I need to write my own BBcode in there as well.

Thanks for the clarifications on the whys and why nots.