I was under the impression that the board software (separate from any vegetable link stuff) turned anything looking like a link into a link upon submit. Is this not so?
In this thread as I see it, NONE of those gardenweb.com links are actual clickable links.
But what if I type: www.gardenweb.com – does that become a clickable link? Let’s find out. . .
Results as seen upon preview:
(1) No, gardenweb.com does NOT become a link, but…
(2) Yes, www.gardenweb.com DOES become a link.
Conclusion: As far as the vBulletin software is concerned, the link must begin with www to be recognized as a link and turned into one. I presume this is vBulletin at work, and not viglink.
To make it NOT be a link on a one-time basis, surround it with: [noparse][noparse]…[/noparse][/noparse] tags, as Inner Stickler notes in Post #3.
I was getting links, so I disabled Vigilink and now I don’t. What I want to know is how does it work? If it’s to work on all sites, it must be on my computer. But it didn’t seem to install like a Firefox add-in. If I use IE would it still be disabled?
The Wiki page is all about how wonderful it is for a site. No mention at all about how it works.
Viglink’s “magic” is javascript uploaded to your browser to identify link-a-fyiable text on the document (the web page you’re looking at) and convert them to live links. All in your browser, between when the page is loaded into your browser’s memory and when it’s presented to you.
Viglink subscribers (like SDMB) are given a little library of stuff for their web servers that get uploaded as part of page composition and enables the Viglink voodoo. For this, subscribers are amply recompensed (I’d guess on the order of DOZENS of CENTS per page) and users get borderline malware behavior Everyone who matters wins!
Use the globe with a link icon just above the reply box. Click it and paste your link in it. If you want to post an identifier, then highlight the text between the url tags and type your identifier in like this.
Thanks. That I guessed. My real question was on my end. Given that I’ve now opted out of Vigilink, that information (that I’ve opted out) must be stored someplace. And I’d think it must be stored on my computer otherwise I’d have to disable it for each site. But I don’t know another site to test to see if this is so. So is my opt-out a cookie? an add-in? what? I didn’t see an add-in asking for permission.
I deleted the square brackets around the noparse in my fourth line … the text was treated as an opening tag without it’s ending tag … throwing a rather unusual error … my fault …
Same for me. “gardenweb.com” in the OP isn’t clickable on my tablet where I have to have Javascript disabled to be able to browse the SDMB at all without going insane since ad blocking isn’t possible there. But it’s clickable on my laptop with Firefox and Adblocker, and copying the link reveals that it’s the Viglink mess. Viglink is the malware in this case.
Ad blockers typically do not block viglink by default. You can add viglink.com to your ad blocker’s list if you want to block viglink.
Alternately, since viglink works via javascript, you can also use a script blocker to kill it.
And as a third alternative, you can use the opt out link upthread (see cochrane’s post).
Or, you can just leave it and let it do its thing. Personally, I think viglink is the spawn of Satan and needs to be banished forever into the fiery depths of Hell, but some folks don’t have quite the same bad opinion of it.
