تمييز عنوان URL لا يرقى إلى المواصفات

P.S. When I tried to post, I saw An error occurred: Sorry, new users can only put 2 links in a post. popup. I don’t know what kind of spam is it able to prevent as one link is enough for most spammers, but now I have to replace some of my nicely-formatted markdown links with text-based footnotes. The process of adding a footnote in the default markdown editor is by itself so glitchy and infuriating to be worth a separate report.


P.S.S. It appears that Markdown-based references are also counted as links. Removing them in favor of Unicode superscript digits. At 40th minute of me trying to write this post.


According to STD 66 / RFC 3986¹ (human-friendly extracted list²), 81 characters may be unescaped in a URL fragment or queue. This list, sorted in ASCII order by the framework “Foundation³” in the Swift programming language: !$&'()*+,-./0123456789:;=?@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ_abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz~

The following is a URL containing several of these characters: Example Domain '()*+,-./0123456789:;=?@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ_abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz~ As you may see, highlighting is being cut off at a certain point.

While working at my project that uses these 81 characters to encode binary data in fragments (in base64 fashion, but more compact) I checked now up-to-spec highlighting is on several websites. While a similar bug was, inconsistently, present in some other places (like GitHub forum being unable to highlight the last character if it’s a ~), Discourse has the widest selection of broken symbols. Some characters may or may not break the highlighting depending on some mysterious context, hence I don’t think I would be able to compose a comprehensive list.

¹ Google rfc/rfc3986.txt
² Look for Stack Overflow answer #26119120
³ Look up documentation/foundation/nscharacterset/urlfragmentallowed on Apple > Developer


P.S.S.S. Some standard E-Mail addresses are also not highlighted. I’ll use my second link to link to https://e-mail.wtf for some examples.

Not highlighted, but should be:

orgmail(to John Doe)@example.com
“:(){ :|:& };:”@example.com
magic@[::1]

إعجاب واحد (1)

Welcome to our community!

Thanks for posting this. I don’t think what you are reporting is a Bug per se so have moved it to Feature. It might actually belong somewhere like Dev because it is very technical.

This is a limit for new users, to prevent fly by spammers from posting lots of links. Once you’ve spent a little time here that limit will be lifted automatically. Here on meta, I raised the limit from the default of 2 URLs to 5 because it does seem rather strict and we also have AI antispam measures in place that catch all the spam, no matter how many links.

If you have further feedback about this, feel free to start a topic in Site feedback.