If you are on a desktop computer, pause your mouse over a link to show the URL. If you are on an Android device (and probably an iOS one) long-press on it to reveal the URL. Neither requires that you actually open that URL. If neither opening the link or reading the URL interests you, you are free to move on. I promise that your lawn is undisturbed.
FYI, in general the various SDMB themes do a shitty job of highlighting the fact embedded text is a link. Whether on a PC, a tablet, or a phone. If the link is a long phrase, there might be enough color to be obvious. But if the link is a single short word such as “here”, odds are most people will NOT see that it’s a link. I sure won’t. On my theme on my laptop it appears as a very dark navy blue-colored word as against the field of black text on a light gray background. The color difference is just about invisible.
In fact in your (D_G’s) post, I didn’t realize it was a link until after a few people had clicked on it and the little bubble showing the number of folks who’d clicked on it appeared. Which bubble I’m not sure appears in all themes on all devices. Nor do I think very many of our users even know what that bubble icon means.
My personal solution when I want to include an inline link is to bold and underline the text. Underline signals a link, as it has since Ye Olden Dayes of webpages, and the bold ensures it stands out from my usual wall of text writing style. Sadly, although you can bold by selecting the text and entering Ctrl-B, to underline you need to manually supply the code
[u]Example of underlining that’s not really a clickable url[/u].
to achieve the appearance
Example of underlining that’s not really a clickable url.
When you put it all together with a real clickable url it looks like this:
Click here to go to Google.
and is coded like this
Click **[u][here](https://www.google.com)[/u]** to go to Google.
That’s pretty unmistakable. I take no credit for this convention. I think it was @engineer_comp_geek who turned me onto it back in the vBulletin days.
If our goal is to be understood, it’s incumbent on us as writers to make it easy for readers to get our meaning; all of our meaning.
Why don’t the coyotes put in some…air conditioning+ventilation?
Money. Also the presence of A/C on a cargo trailer is a giveaway.
In most cases they deliver their cargo just fine without it. It’s only the horror stories we read about. Not the other 25 (total WAG) truckloads that get smuggled successfully every day.
Apparently they did, as stories are now saying they claim they didn’t know it wasn’t working.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/01/us/san-antonio-migrant-truck-deaths-air-conditioning/index.html
Yeah, I think I won’t be adding steak seasoning to my food for a while after this story…
That isn’t remotely true. Colored but otherwise unaltered text for links has been normal web use (even for single words) for many years. See, for example, a screencap I just made from Wikipedia
It is true that colored text alone has been used for links, but colored text is also used for other things. Color + underline is universally understood to be a link, to the point that it not being a link can confuse people.
That said, the big problem on the SDMB is just that the default link color is dark enough and the text thin enough that, on some monitors, it doesn’t obviously look like a link. It’s why one of the first tweaks I did was to brighten the color and add an underline to all links. (This also makes it clear if two words in a row are one link or two.)
My main solution for everyone else is to mostly use the Onebox for links, but I do also underline all links when I use them in text. I’ve missed links before, and have had others miss them in my posts.
For your post, I probably would have just added the Onebox.