Google is perhaps the most popular search engine, but Dogpile is a meta-search incorporating Google and other search engines, sometimes returning results that Google alone sometimes omits.
Interesting; I omitted the closing double-quotes in the first link in that post and it doesn’t appear at all - in fact everything up to the second link is missing (quote the first post in this thread and you’ll see it contains more than is visible above).
Ah, it’s included all of the missing text in the URL to which it’s trying to link. I’m sure the old board reacted in a different way to this - I think it just displayed the malformed tag as text.
That is odd. even embedding a quote of it in code doesn’t protect the first sentence from oblivion.
Desquarebracketized Mangetout:
(url="http://www.google.com)Google(/url) is perhaps the most popular search engine, but (url=“http://www.dogpile.com”)Dogpile(/url) is a meta-search incorporating Google and other search engines, sometimes returning results that Google alone sometimes omits.
IIRC, at one time using double quotes was required, but at some point that changed. The instructions now do not include double quotes with the url.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/misc.php?do=bbcode#url
To confuse this, sometimes double quotes will work anyway.
Forgetting to close the quotes inside the URL tag is a really common error for me; I’m certain that on the old server, this didn’t result in a big chunk of text being parsed as part of the URL, but we’re running the same version aren’t we?
It’s not that I want to be able to make mistakes with impunity, it’s just that it seems the board’s reaction to this particular error is more severe than it used to be…
I’ve certainly seen this problem crop up before (two links in a single post, squeezed together into a single link with the intervening text mangled into the URL), for many years, and I’m pretty sure that this is exactly what caused it before. As I remember it, the problem originally occured whenever quote marks were omitted in a link. The problem was eventually half-fixed, so that if all the links in a post omitted the quote marks, they would all work, but if they’re mixed, you get what you saw.
Google is perhaps the most popular search engine, but
That’s more like what I’m accustomed to seeing - broken, but not vanished - maybe it’s the interaction of two links - one broken and one working, that I’ve never happened to see before.
You’re kidding. I didn’t know anyone still used quotes with the url tag. They’re completely unnecessary, why type superfluous characters that add more likelihood of goofing up the tag?
I still use the quotes for html links, because that was how I learned HTML in the first place years ago–has the necessity for that been dropped now too?
And I didn’t know anyone still omitted the quotes. Why leave off a mere couple of characters if it’ll add more likelihood of goofing up the tag?
I have to go with the “why add quote marks?” group. The tags work just fine without them. I haven’t used them since the first time I forgot and it all worked out fine. 
Because the method documented in the official FAQ is not to use them at all.
Force of habit, I guess. I can’t remember where I picked up that habit, but I think it was on an old board that had problems parsing unquoted strings containing spaces.
What? You have it backwards. Fewer characters entered means less likelihood of a typo. When I took classes in computer programming, the first principle we learned was called K.I.S.S. (keep it simple, sweetie)