IP.Board 3.1 Dev Update: Auto parsing of URLs strengthened

[bfarber]

Our IP.Board 3.1 beta testing stage is well underway, and so far things are looking pretty good. We want to take a moment to thank everyone for their time and effort helping us to test IP.Board 3.1. Your contributions are appreciated and only help to ensure the quality of the software is nothing less than you would expect from us upon final release.

While IP.Board 3.1 is feature locked, we recently took some time to work on the URL parsing routines to deal with a couple of issues, and thought you might like to hear about these updates.

Auto parsing of media tags

IP.Board 3.0 introduced the new [ media ] tag, which is used to embed multimedia, like YouTube videos and more, into posts and other areas. This tag works just great, but we've heard from many of you that you think it would be better if media that works within the special tag was parsed and displayed automatically, even if the media tag was omitted.

As of IP.Board 3.1, this is now the case. If you copy and paste a link that would correctly parse inside the media tag into your post without media tags, IP.Board's bbcode parsing routine will recognize this and automatically embed your YouTube video or other media right in the post without any other user intervention!


Parsing of URLs with commas

We've had some passionate discussions spring up across the forums over the past couple of months discussing whether a comma character that would seemingly be part of a URL should be parsed as part of the URL. IP.Board 3.0 originally did so, however this was changed during an early 3.0 release due to a posted bug report. Regardless of the history, many of our customers felt that if a URL has a comma contained within it, that comma should be treated as part of the URL. If it contains a comma at the end of the URL, it should not.

You'll be happy to know that IP.Board 3.1 will now present commas as part of the URL appropriately. Here are some example scenarios (the URL bbcode tag was not used to post these) so you can see how it will work:

http://community.invisionpower.com/index.php?test=1
http://community.invisionpower.com/index.php?test=1,2
http://community.invisionpower.com/index.php?test=1,2&something=3
I like http://community.invisionpower.com/index.php?test=1, and that's all!

This is a relatively minor change, but one which we feel many of our customers will be happy to hear will be included in 3.1. Just a note: if you don't know, don't care, or don't know why commas in a URL should matter to you then you can ignore this small change :)


International Domain Names

ICANN (the body that regulates domain names) has recently begun approving (and examples are popping up in the wild) domain names that contain non-latin characters in them (known as IDNs). While this won't affect many of our customers, we decided to take this opportunity, before 3.1 is released, to ensure that IP.Board will correctly parse such URLs.

Some examples:

http://παράδειγμα.δοκιμή/
http://وزارة-الأتصالات.مصر

If you expect such domain names to be used on your board, you should expect that IP.Board 3.1 will be able to correctly parse such URLs. We always want to try to stay "ahead of the curve", and this is just one example where we'd rather implement expected functionality now, before our members are affected by any legacy limitations.


These changes have been applied to our board here as of the time of this posting, so feel free to try out the new changes in the test posting forum. As always, we look forward to your feedback, and if you happen to find any bugs, please report them to our bug tracker.

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