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I recently posted an answer on stackoverflow that rendered perfectly in the editor preview, but in the posted text the links all got gobbled up: links were stretching across multiple lines where they shouldn't, from another the url showed up directly in the posting. A friendly fellow on SO then simply replaced the offending url with one that provides the same text on another server, and the problem was gone. The offending url was

http://web.archive.org/web/20070502155005/http://wagerlabs.com/2006/8/25/writing-low-pain-massively-scalable-multiplayer-servers

To see the posting in question check this answer, look for the initial version of it.

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Funnily enough, the choke move you're talking about has been brought up before and was recently floated back to the front page of questions by Community.

In short, the editor will not parse embedded links well and the cause for your error/edit.

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  • Isn't that a bit of a lame answer?! For one thing, the editor preview is rendering the links fine, so there is a part of the system that can handle those links. For another, I can see no technical reason why you shouldn't be able to handle any link, since they are always clearly delimited, and the system doesn't have to parse them from free text. I even tried to embed the links directly with HTML <a href="..."></a>, and it failed. At least this should work for any URL. Is SO, a technicians site, saying "You cannot provide arbitrary URLs because we cannot get our CMS to handle them"?!
    – ThomasH
    Commented Aug 1, 2009 at 10:07
  • Looks like they/we/you are.
    – random
    Commented Aug 1, 2009 at 11:00
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We now encode any ":" chars that occur past a certain position in the URL so this should work.

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    Yeah, that's what I know now. Try figuring that out when you have five links in your post and no idea which one is causing the mess...
    – ThomasH
    Commented Aug 1, 2009 at 16:34
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    I checked tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3986#section-2.2, and the ":" should in fact be escaped. So http%3A// should be a valid alternative to the URL shortening services. I will try this next time :-).
    – ThomasH
    Commented Aug 3, 2009 at 21:28

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