In the free association thread, I typed in M A T C H. COM. (without spaces). When I hit enter, I apparently posted a link to match.com, which was not my intent.
Does it always do this?
Yes, pretty much. There are weird workarounds: you can type "match.com­ " and get match.com , or you can type `match.com` to get match.com.
(` is the backtick character, usually found at the top left of US keyboards, below the escape key.)
I usually just type the word dot. For example, match dot com.
What is ­ ? I’ve always used for the same purpose (more specifically, when quoting the previous post in full, add to prevent Discobot from deleting the quote of the post).
Oh, okay, I googled it myself. It’s a “soft hyphen”. I can see where it might not do the thing you want in some cases.
Yeah, technically the more correct thing to do would be to use ​, but that’s so much longer to type. I find it easier to think of the URL being too “shy” to become a link.