Why are some links not clickable?

C

ClubMan

Registered User
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https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/ireland-edges-into-top-10-global-tax-haven-ranking-2024-10-01

Edit: don't know why URLs don't work as clickable links from time to time here on Askaboutmoney even with the correct markup tags.

 
Weird, I just went to edit it via the 'insert link' option but left it unchanged and it now appears correctly.

Edit- reload the page and it's no longer clickable
 
I think that this is a separate problem. The link is clickable but just doesn't unfurl because of something to do with the content of the page that it is linking to

Link Unfurl Problem

Hello. We noticed that some links were not clickable when shared as messages on the forum. As you can see in the example in the image, this problem can be fixed by quoting the message. No error messages, no logs. Does anyone know the solution to the problem?
xenforo.com
 
FWIW
I noticed earlier in that same thread
that a link I posted,
looked clickable after I saved the post,
but as soon as I refreshed the page it had changed to an unclickable link.

Repeated it a few times as I thought it was something I was doing.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Sounds the same as the behaviour that I was getting @Zenith63.
Do you recall what the site/URL was?

Edit: oh - was it the one here perhaps?

Reuters - "Ireland edges into top 10 global tax haven ranking"

https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/ireland-edges-into-top-10-global-tax-haven-ranking-2024-10-01 Ireland edges into top 10 global tax haven ranking DUBLIN, Oct 1 (Reuters) - Ireland has leapfrogged the Bahamas to become the world's ninth most significant tax haven, according to a ranking...
www.askaboutmoney.com
 
Yep it was that post, so this URL -

https://cthi.taxjustice.net/
Edit: when i made this post the URL above was at first not clickable. I then edited and saved it and it was clickable, but on refreshing the screen it was again unclickable. Strange!
 
This is the explanation I got from the guys who support Askaboutmoney. I don't really understand it and don't want to allocate time to trying to understand it. We can't go whitelisting sites whenever they are not coming up as clickable. Unless it's a frequently visited Irish site.

It was a false positive of Reuters.com which returns a 401 header response even when the link loads fine (200). I set a standard user agent (Chrome on a Windows 10 machine) on the link checker addon to avoid false positives but in this case it seems Reuters.com is requiring some authentication details (could be some cookies) so the URL works on a web browser (200) but isn't available for the bot.

I whitelisted Reuters.com so all their links will be marked as valid.

https://www.reuters.com
http://www.reuters.com
www.reuters.com


Brendan
 
So there's a bot in the AAM software that must check URLs after they're posted to see if they're valid/spam/malware etc. then convert them into unfurled banners. By pure chance Clubman and I posted two URLs in the same thread that it didn't like. It's not a site wide problem so as you say not worth spending any more time thinking about!
 
I agree that it's probably not such a big deal to merit spending time on it and implementing a general or specific fix. I was just curious as to why it was happening. I noticed oddities with the affected sites/links compared to ones that just work when using wget from the command line to fetch them, but still didn't/don't fully understand the issue. Worst case scenario for links that don't work automatically is that the user has to manually copy and paste them I guess.
 
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