link urls when sent over skypeweb

[urandom2]

I frequently talk with people via skypeweb that use the official skype client, and they always complain that my url links are never clickable. If I switch over to the official client or the web client, both will create linked urls for my contacts.

Let me know if there is any help you need with reproducing this issue.

[EionRobb]

Hmm. I haven't had problems from the users I send links to. Do you have an example link that doesn't work?

[urandom2]

If you have the official client on hand, and can spin up a second account, this should be pretty trivial to confirm. Not sure how to test or fix, but you should at least see the same issue. As far as what links, pretty much anything that the official skype client converts (not sure of their regex) is just text when skypeweb sends it. Here are a few confirmed examples.

http://google.com
https://google.com
http://www.amazon.com/Lark-Ro-Womens-Sleeve-Medium/dp/B015667GUE/ref=lp_13631152011_1_1

Also, while testing the following address was never received on the official client, and appears to have been dropped as later messages go through with no issue, and there are no error messages in the bitlbee process that is running skypeweb.

http://www.amazon.com/Lark-Ro-Womens-Sleeve-Medium/dp/B015667GUE/ref=lp_13631152011_1_1?s=apparel&ie=UTF8&qid=1456768473&sr=1-1&nodeID=13631152011

[EionRobb]

Oh, this is a bitlbee thing? Hmm. I guess bitlbee isn't auto-linkifying urls like Pidgin does. I'll see what can be done, but I'm not sure if this will be a plugin thing or a bitlbee thing

[urandom2]

If this is a bitlbee issue, would it be worthwhile to open up an issue over there?

[vitalyster]

The same issue is in Spectrum. What is the "auto-linkify" function?

[ojdo]

I just encountered a stronger form of this issue: when sending a link with a & in it, the whole message w/ link even got swallowed (=not received by conversation partner) at all. Example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SinVP29pGqg&t=54

[EionRobb]

@ojdo was that with bitlbee or spectrum that the &'s aren't coming through encoded?

[ojdo]

@EionRobb oh sorry, bad bug report :-( Hopefully better: A message containing a URL with an & is not received by my conversation partner. Interestingly, an isolated ampersand (e.g. foo & bar) is sent without issue.

• Me: weechat (1.4-1) + bitlbee-libpurple (3.4.1+20160312+master+137-gb1d9c06-git) + skypeweb (compiled on top of commit 80368db8f881)
• Partner: current Skype Desktop client

[a13]

I have the same issue with non-clickable links sent via bitlbee-purple

[ravenexp]

Same issue with & in URLs. I get "Failure due to: BlockedContent." error message.

[heeplr]

I have the same issue with the current version + spectrum. There are a few things happening here as far as I understand:

• pidgin converts links to HTML. I don't think it should. Suddenly switching to HTML is confusing and no other XMPP or IRC client I know does this. At least, it should be an optional feature that can be turned off. (This probably won't happen. We will have to keep doing CTRL+A -> Font -> Reset formatting for every URL so communication partners don't receive HTML gibberish.)

• other purple'able clients don't do this (for obvious reasons)

• skype actually needs this to function

• other XMPP clients (e.g. Conversations on android) actually strip any HTML so you can't even add it manually

Surely bitlbee & spectrum won't begin to auto-linkify URLs just because Skype needs that done serverside.

Maybe the perfect solution would be to move the "auto-linkify" code from pidgin to libpurple and have a config option to disable it? I'm not sure what the best solution to this issue is but it's annoying af! ;)

EDIT: added XMPP clients situation

[heeplr]

Any news on this?

A possible solution might be to introduce a "bridge-compatibility" mode like purple-gowhatsapp does, as I don't see spectrum/bitlbee modifying messages in the future.