Which appears exactly like the link in the main body of the message.
However if I preview the message, right click the url, copy the short cut and cut and paste it into a browser I see;
Has something changed or am I doing something really stupid?
When the dialog box first appears, it has http:// in it. Are you appending the fully qualified URL to that, or are you overwriting it? It appears, from the mangled link in the linked post, that you appended the fully qualified URL.
I have seen that happening sometimes too.
Did you recognize what exactly happens and how that mangles your link ?
As PaulS points out, the button in the toolbar of the "deluxe" (or whatever it's called) editor pre-formats the link.
It assumes a link is no link if it doesn't start with "HTTPS://", so it "helps" you by adding that to the link, whether you did that yourself already or not.
I don't use that toolbar and just type out the codes while composing messages, and yet have seen that problem before once or twice.
I do try to do a preview before i submit messages with links or other special functions, so i can test those functions to do what i expected them to do.
But that will cast me from the bare editor into the 'deluxe' editor, and sometimes messes up the post.
So did how did you create your post, and when did you notice this problem ?
So did how did you create your post, and when did you notice this problem ?
I only noticed the problem when people said the links in my posts did not work.
To generate a message I press reply. Within the reply I press the link button. It opens a field that already contains the text http://
Since the link I paste in normally already has http:// or https:// I delete the preexisting text before pasting in my link. I don't add a description. The resulting link "looks" perfect in preview. However if I copy the link and paste it into a browser it appears to still have the extra http:// that I had deleted.
I'll stick in some trial links.
Here is a link where I just paste in http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/ without first deleting anything in the link box; http://http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/
Here is a link where I delete the preexisting text in the link box;
Here is a link where I type in www.engineeringtoolbox.com/ into the link box i.e. I delete http:// from the link before pasting it in the box;
The first link fails as you would expect.
I was also expecting the second link to fail because that was what was happening previously but it now works - has somebody changed something?
The third final link was not something I had tried before, my money was on it working which it does.
The first one looks like you did not delete the http:// from the box. It is highlighted when the dialog is posted, so if you just hit the paste key(s), it is deleted, and the pasted text replaces it.
If you select in the box, the text is un-highlighted. Pressing delete then does nothing. If you then paste the URL, you'll get http://http://someUrl in the box, which produces the broken link.
I'll follow Robin2's tip of looking at the source.
PaulS wrote
The first one looks like you did not delete the http:// from the box. It is highlighted when the dialog is posted, so if you just hit the paste key(s), it is deleted, and the pasted text replaces it.
In the first one I deliberately did not delete the pre-existing http://
However my Firefox browser is not working in the way you suggest. If I click on the link button the box appears with an http:// already it, but it is not highlighted. The box is also not selected so I cannot paste without first selecting the box. My normal method of working is; press the link button, select the box, delete the http://, past in my link which will normally already begin either http:// or https:// . I am sure that method was working but recently I was still getting the extra http:// even though I had deleted it and it did not show in the preview. Strangely though today the problem did not arise.