This comment is caused by a tool called the link-validator. It's new, and still in development. You can see some development effort at https://stackoverflow.com/review/broken-links; but all the buttons cause a 'dev only not implemented yet' error.
Your error is caused by the link validator assuming that all links should point to non-redirected live websites on the global internet. Yours does not. As a subset of this assumption, the link validator (author) identified a common problem: IP address links are broken quite often. For these reasons, the link validator does not allow your link to be posted.
I disagree with these assumptions. It's obvious to anyone with computer experience that 192.168.1.1
is an invalid host. However, if you're writing about a local server running at this address, it makes sense. At work, we have an Ethernet-based development board which has a hard-coded IP address of 10.0.0.1
, and many of our internal wikis contain links to this IP address: Clicking on a link, assuming that the reader has this configuration, will do something useful. Similarly, Stack Overflow has ostensibly broken links to http://localhost/
(834 posts) and http://localhost:8080/
(393 posts). They're the two most common 'broken links' on the site. In the first 10 instances I looked at, they were intentionally links - Someone attempting to follow the steps in an answer or reproduce the problem described in a question would be expected to want to click on these links.
This is, I believe, an instance of the link validator being overzealous.
edit:
grumble grumble....
Oops! Your answer couldn't be submitted because:
- Your post contains a link to the invalid domain 'localhost'.
Please correct it by specifying a full domain or wrapping it in a code block.
- Your post contains a link to the invalid domain 'localhost'.
Please correct it by specifying a full domain or wrapping it in a code block.
http://localhost/
and consider how many of those posts actually intend to link to localhost. I'd say it's all of them.