[Pidgin] #2336: Auto-linking (URI linkification) -- who wants it?

[Pidgin]

#2336: Auto-linking (URI linkification) -- who wants it?
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 Reporter:  shreevatsa    |       Type:  defect
   Status:  new           |   Priority:  minor 
Component:  pidgin (gtk)  |    Version:  2.1.0 
 Keywords:                |    Pending:  0     
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 Pidgin (the core libpurple itself I think) has this feature of detecting
 URLs and turning them into links. While this seems like a good idea, it is
 irritating when it fails, which is often.

 In XMPP (the protocol I use the most, with Google Talk), Pidgin sends both
 HTML and plain-text with every message, and "text" that links to "url" is
 sent as "text" <"url">.

 You know what happens: When there is a URL like http://example.com, the
 thing sent out in plain-text is http://example.com <http://example.com>.

 Now if the friend's client does not support xhtml-im, they see exactly the
 above -- the URI twice!

 And this (clients not supporting HTML) are very common, and include
 Google's official clients  (Google Talk, GMail) and of course, finch :-)

 Especially with long URLs, this can get very irritating for the receiving
 end. (And with the bug in #2335, they see the URI '''four''' times! And
 there's the #1310 bug too...)

 With this in mind, I wonder if this feature is really worth it at all.
 Pidgin already converts URIs to links in incoming messages, and that works
 fine. So do Google's clients. So do most clients, I would expect. And so
 would even gnome-terminal, if the other user is using that to run finch.
 Is it really necessary?

 (Of course, fixing it so that "url" gets sent in the plaintext as "url"
 and not "url" <"url"> would do as well :-) )

-- 
Ticket URL: <http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/2336>
Pidgin <http://pidgin.im>
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