Every time I try to make a post that contains an external link I get an error page that says "Service Unavailable" and something about not being available to process my request.. Just wanted to let you know..
Every time I try to make a post that contains an external link I get an error page that says "Service Unavailable" and something about not being available to process my request.. Just wanted to let you know..
TEST THIS LINK.................................
Works for me. You need BB code though, not HTML. HTML is unavaliable, so it might just be telling you so.
To make the link above I used [URL=http://www.google.com]TEST THIS LINK.................................[/URL]
(And the annoyingly large number of dots is because posts can't be very short.)
www.google.com
weird.. seems to work now..
I spent a couple hours looking for conditions that would lead to a parse error like that and I am unable to find anything... sorry.
Maybe the server decided to go to Maui or became sentient and refused to show the link to anyone having decided that it's jealous.
I could certainly see the jealousy if linking to google. Thats one computationally massive network.
All joking aside - if it happens again get me the most accurate timestamp you can so I can see if any of the scripts here are blocking it.
I may have solved this - if you copy an Ebay address (usually quite long...) directly and try to post it as a link, you get the 'Service unobtainable' error; however, if you save the Ebay item by clicking the 'watch this item' button, then go into 'My Ebay' and select the item from there, it'll have a different, much shorter address, ending =STRK:MEWAX:IT that will post OK. No idea why this is, unless the site has a length limit on messages.
Yep. It's only been happening when I try to post ebay addresses. Just realized that last night. Nice!! thanks!
Protip for posting e-bay auction links:
Highlight the auction number and copy it to the clipboard. Now paste the auction number into E-bay's search box and hit enter. You will be taken directly to that auction, and the URL will have none of the extraneous code at the end. Highlight that URL and copy it. That's the one you want to paste into your forum post. Works every time.
Adam
PS: If you're careful, you can also simply strip all the extra crap off manually. But it's easy to miss a character or two, and if you do that you end up with a malformed link that won't work. You won't have this problem if you search for the auction number and then copy that URL...
Ok... I figured it out... but I can't fix it.
The "update" to the vbulletin software changed the way url's were handled. Before it was syntax agnostic and would parse it without an issue. now it searches for "known" phrases before it will parse it out. When you add http:// as a prefix upon submission it attempts to add another. It craps out with that vague and useless error. So, basically... as far as I can tell... any text entered will be parsed out to a correct link if it matches the wildcard "www.*.*"
Since ebay has cgi.whatever.whatever it appears to not be caught... I will see if I can square this away and file a bug report with the Vbulletin dev's this evening.
Now that I know this... It doesn't make it any less retarded... more so actually.
Heh.
Is there any way to enter hyperlinks so vBulletin copies them verbatim? I tried using both the [ url ] tags and the hyperlink button (which should be doing the same), but the error keeps popping up.
I just referred to the auction numbers for now.
Having a quick test, vB seems to do it even when you enter the URL in the message as text. Wrapping either the HTML or PHP tags around it has no effect, it still seems to pass through the vB parsing/censoring logic nonetheless.
The workaround I found is h t t p : / /then-rest-of-link-goes-here.
If I put http://link-is-here, it returns an error.
The extra spaces in the http make it non-clickable, but it will at least post then the viewer can copy/paste and remove spaces.
Most all of my link issues have been in PM's