Discussion on DirectLink | Userscripts.org

directLinkCaption ^ irreplacable, replied by Richard H. Tingstad

Richard H. Tingstad — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 08:39:38 +0000

Hi!

The code that prevents you from changing the caption directly is 'GM_getValue("directLinkCaption")'.

Write "about:config" in your Firefox address bar and find "directLinkCaption". Alter it! Screenshot: http://imgur.com/VVFiI.png

The purpose of doing it this way is to allow you to update the script source code without losing your caption customization :)

directLinkCaption ^ irreplacable, replied by uplink

uplink — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 00:02:03 +0000

Hi,
I made a quick scan through the code, but couldn't find out, why replacing the "^" symbol has no effect on the actual caption of the created link.
It would be easier to click a little larger space, like [^].
But generally, it's a very useful script. Thanks for publishing.

Not working on google image, replied by Richard H. Tingstad

Richard H. Tingstad — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 06:28:25 +0000

Hi. Thank you for your feedback, but can you please be more specific? It seems to work for me: http://img188.imageshack.us/img188/3157/directl...

Not working on google image, replied by asm@m

asm@m — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 23:24:41 +0000

Hi.
its not working on google image

Tweak to reduce false positives with various script extensions, replied by ns4tne

ns4tne — Fri, 15 May 2009 22:08:54 +0000

Ah, thanks. The update is looking good so far (I'm using Firefox, and had temporarily forgotten about Opera).

Tweak to reduce false positives with various script extensions, replied by Richard H. Tingstad

Richard H. Tingstad — Sun, 10 May 2009 14:44:03 +0000

Sorry for the late reply. I just updated the script. You can now alter a TLD black list in about:config. They will however only be black listed if they miss foo:// and something like /foo.html. Thank you for the tip! I agree that .do and .py often are annoying, and also that using about:config is a good thing. Unfortunately, Opera users will not get the about:config functionality.

Grabs email addresses too, replied by ns4tne

ns4tne — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 08:36:50 +0000

The onmouseout change is a bit confusing at first, but for your target audience of power users I don't think it matters much.

At any rate, I greatly appreciate the change.

Tweak to reduce false positives with various script extensions, replied by ns4tne

ns4tne — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 08:35:41 +0000

Well, I actually do see links that have no protocol at times, and I do occasionally find those useful -- not, perhaps, quite often enough, but certainly at least as often as I find .py links.

P.S. Sorry for not responding sooner; I forgot to check back, and userscripts.org doesn't do so hot at reminding me.

Tweak to reduce false positives with various script extensions, replied by Richard H. Tingstad

Richard H. Tingstad — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 18:13:09 +0000

Well resonated. That is absolutely a possibility. An alternative could be to (optionally) ignore URLs that do not begin with "foo://". But perhaps that will exclude too many real cases, I'm not sure. How often do you see those? For example, on reddit there are links like "http://www.reddit.com/domain/cnn.com" which are correctly guessed to be http://cnn.com. But is that link really that useful?

Tweak to reduce false positives with various script extensions, replied by ns4tne

ns4tne — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 06:00:43 +0000

I've noticed a lot of times DirectLink will see a link that ends in .py or .do or what have you and, because these are valid ccTLDs, add a direct link to them -- which of course usually goes nowhere, and is merely confusing. Ideally, this wouldn't happen, as webmasters wouldn't use extensions on there pages at all. In practice, of course, a different solution must be found.
On the one hand, any decent script that manipulates URLs should handle all valid TLDs, even rare ones. On the other hand, many users have no need to link to certain rare ccTLDs, especially as such sites are likely to be in a different language even if valid. And, of course, as previously mentioned, most such direct links are false positives anyway.
That being the case, I suggest allowing customization of which TLDs are valid -- likely only ccTLDs would be necessary, as I have never seen a page name that conflicts with the registered gTLDs. Now obviously, it is not all that hard to simply edit the script source directly to customize which names are valid, but then every time the script is updated, changes are lost and must be carried forward; also, it's poor style to rely on such hacking, as a general rule.
It would probably be sufficient to maintain a (pre-populated) blacklist in prefs of ccTLDs that will not be recognized, along with a simple option to turn the blacklist on or off (defaulting, likely, to off). This would make hiding those false positives a simple matter of flipping a single pref in about:config.

Grabs email addresses too, replied by Richard H. Tingstad

Richard H. Tingstad — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 21:02:12 +0000

I have now changed the script so that foo@bar.com is treated as an email address. However, I made the http:// interpretation available by interchanging between the two on mouseout.

Email addresses are distinguished from other links by having caption "@".

I hope this works, and that the onmouseout change doesn't confuse too much.

Grabs email addresses too, replied by Richard H. Tingstad

Richard H. Tingstad — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 17:01:30 +0000

Hm, thanks for the comment. It is always a dilemma whether one should handle some cases differently based on probability. I have had similar thoughts regarding the .do extension, but decided to not make any exceptions. The case you mention could be more eligible though.

The question is, how often does this case occur? My guess is that an URL with an email address is not very common. On the other hand, as you say, how often is it an URL with a username?

A third alternative would be to link to both the http: and mailto: versions (if it is a valid email address).

Grabs email addresses too, replied by ns4tne

ns4tne — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 20:40:10 +0000

The regex used (good job on making that readable, BTW) grabs embedded email address too with the section to allow usernames. I'm not sure this is a good thing, especially since those links come out as e.g. <http://sample_user@hotmail.com/> (from a forum link to MSN Messenger -- <http://members.msn.com/sample_user@hotmail.com>). Now, according to the specs, of course, that's a perfectly well-formed URL -- but in practice, it's VERY unlikely it's actually a URL.

I have two suggestions for correcting this. The first possibility is to try to detect email addresses and give them the right mailto: protocol. The other possibility is to simply discard them.
Personally, I would say a good compromise would be to use a pref to allow discarding emails and default to adding mailto: to appropriate addresses.

Problem, replied by JoeSimmons

JoeSimmons — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 21:45:55 +0000

Nah it's ok I made my own anyways.

Problem, replied by Richard H. Tingstad

Richard H. Tingstad — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 18:49:59 +0000

Hi, the problem is that we do not always want to replace the original link with the direct link. Some links are supposed to contain the URL "indirectly", for example http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=http%3A%2... (Same goes for Digg, reddit, del.icio.us, etc.)

However, if you really want to replace the normal link, it is not very difficult to modify the code to do so :)

Problem, replied by JoeSimmons

JoeSimmons — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 21:50:34 +0000

The script works well but it's putting a caret (^) as a link after the normal link.
Will you make the script so it replaces the old link with the direct link?
The page I'm having trouble with is here and it's the comment by me (thetenfold), the one with a green checkmark in it. The link says "here."

Archived Comments, replied by anonymous_user

anonymous_user — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 05:09:57 +0000

This doesnt work for Google Images. It doesnt go to the image.

Archived Comments, replied by moryabdi

moryabdi — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 03:12:14 +0000

you can use redirect remover an extension of firefox with great option..

Archived Comments, replied by Richard H. Tingstad

Richard H. Tingstad — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 08:54:01 +0000

Any comments are welcome..

Archived Comments, replied by Jesse Andrews

Jesse Andrews — Wed, 17 Nov 2004 01:05:27 +0000

The following is an archive of comments made before threaded discussions was implemented (November 16th, 2008)