![The estimated fallout zone from the train wreck in Ohio. [739x719 - 459KB]](https://pic8.co/sh/F9Yaev.png){kind=link}
Will you mind telling me why you and some others have started this weird thing with obfuscating links in text and then putting (pic8.co) in parenthesis after it? It seems absurd and makes no sense to me. It takes longer than just pasting a link, and then also manually adding where the link goes to in parenthesis afterward is pointless since hovering on the link will tell anyone where that link goes to already. Is it just the 'cool kids' trend-setting/social engineering?
It’s called hyperlink tag and it’s the users using them with a custom text.
The extra domain in parenthesis is a feature I automatically added in the markdown parser, so you don’t have to mouse over (or open on mobile) these hyperlinks to know which domain their are linking to.
Thank you for adding that. I can appreciate it now that I am aware it is a feature you've added and was not due to some experiment done by users. Thank you for your efforts!
I do forget about mobile a lot as I've never browsed poal on a phone, and rarely ever browse any web sites at all from a phone.
I apologize also that my usage of "obfuscating' was not correct for what I was meaning. Perhaps 'wrapping' may have been better for describing the link being made to be displayed as text but be clickable instead of being a raw link. Thank you for noting the proper term for that 'insert link as clickable text' function that I was trying to describe.
It is to make sure you don't click on a sketchy link, and it is @AOU doing it.
It ruins a lot of jokes.
Oh, thank you for letting me know. That does explain why it seemed to me to be just a trend-setting behavior being done by a few which was spreading to other random posters 'copying' the behavior. Now I understand that it is being done to any link, likely automatically. Cool.
(post is archived)