[Forum] External URL's in posts after update - how to change how they appear?

[benjones]

I used to have external URL's in posts wrapped in BBCode "[code] URL [code/]" which hides the links from search engines etc

I've now removed the code tags successfully from every forum post using an SQL query.

However the URL's now appear as black text rather than clickable links. If I go into edit for an individual post, make no changes, and click save, the clickable links appear. Obviously don't want to do this for 50,000 posts.

I've tried various maintenance, post and thread rebuild options without success so far (I think all of them?!). Am I missing some other option to automatically update the posts?

Also where is the option for how the URL's should appear? They don't seem uniform; some are just short links eg the url appears as "depositfiles.com" and others the full link eg "http://depositfiles/xxxx". I'd prefer to have the long links.

Putting the problem another way when you enter a new post/update a post the checkbox for automatically parse URL's is ticked so that the tags "[url= URL /url]" are wrapped around every link. How do I/can I go through all old posts to make sure all links are parsed?

Thanks for any help

[Mark.B]

Have you cleared the post cache?
Although I don't think there's any way to make them parse without editing and saving the post....that will at least check that format is correct.

The title only shows if the URL is in this format:
[url=http://www.bbc.co.uk/news]BBC News[/url]

This format will only show the full URL:
[url=http://www.bbc.co.uk/news[/url]

[benjones]

Thanks for both tips although I had cleared the post cache. I think you're right there's no way other than a manual edit and save to parse old posts; might look for a mod at vbulletin.org

[Mark.B]

Thanks for both tips although I had cleared the post cache. I think you're right there's no way other than a manual edit and save to parse old posts; might look for a mod at vbulletin.org

There are modifications that will display the page title and favicon even if the URL is just pasted in (like my second example above).....I doubt it will update existing posts where it isn't parsed though.

[benjones]

I managed to effectively do this with an SQL query as in the example below for URLs for filenames that begin with say 'http://uploaded.net/file' and end in '.rar' or '.zip'

UPDATE post SET pagetext = replace(pagetext, 'http://uploaded.net/file', '[URL]http://uploaded.net/file');
UPDATE post SET pagetext = replace(pagetext, '.rar[/URL].html', '.rar[/URL]');
UPDATE post SET pagetext = replace(pagetext, '.zip', '.zip[/URL]');

Doesn't work for URLs that end in random letters though eg Depositfiles links