Offer Users a Way to Avoid Link Processing in Posts - Screws Things Up Sometimes

If one wants to use a reference to Google Maps in 3D aerial imagery for comparison to what we see in FS 2020, the forum software processes the link and instead presents the 2D street map view. Obviously, the forum software has to check the validity and safety of any link included in a post but I think it should be smarter about reformulating the link. It’s not so smart as things stand now.

For example, this Google Maps 3D link, which I’m breaking to avoiding forum processing
https: // goo. gl/maps/oAbduHiGFVq8XfLu7

gets turned into this (submitting same link and allowing forum software to process, which may take some time.

Thanks for fixing or giving us some options if you can, @moderators

As it is, one has to advise other users to pick View Larger Map and click the Satellite icon in the lower left of the map to get the view intended by offering the initial link.

Experiment: https://goo.gl/maps/oAbduHiGFVq8XfLu7

OK. Duh! The answer is just to include the link on the same line as some text.

Are you looking for a way to link a hyperlink like this without generating a preview? https://goo.gl/maps/oAbduHiGFVq8XfLu7

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Found one way. See edit to original post. Does just including a space character or something like a right or left angle bracket on the same line do it? I’m trying it in the next line:

https://goo.gl/maps/oAbduHiGFVq8XfLu7

I guess a right angle bracket is Markdown for a quote.

Here’s several spaces preceding
https://goo.gl/maps/oAbduHiGFVq8XfLu7

and here’s several left angle brackets
<<<<<<<< https://goo.gl/maps/oAbduHiGFVq8XfLu7 (hmm, a < is not removed as on other Discourse forums whereas a > is unless you use a character entity reference as I just did.

Yes. The forums will only create a preview if a link is on its own line, and has at least one empty line break between it and the proceeding paragraph.

https://goo.gl/maps/oAbduHiGFVq8XfLu7
^ Empty space at the front of the line

https://goo.gl/maps/oAbduHiGFVq8XfLu7 .
^ Non-whitespace character at the end of the line
.
https://goo.gl/maps/oAbduHiGFVq8XfLu7
^ No empty line between the link and the paragraph

1 Like

Yes, it would be nice to both retain the original link and have the 3D map preview - but perhaps that’s too big a picture load for the server?

The easiest way you could do that is something like this… There is a single white space before the second white space.

https://goo.gl/maps/oAbduHiGFVq8XfLu7
 https://goo.gl/maps/oAbduHiGFVq8XfLu7

https://goo.gl/maps/oAbduHiGFVq8XfLu7