Sheri

its worth fighting for 🌷

Writer of word both truth and tale. Video producer, editor, artist, still human. Hire me?

Check #writeup for The Good Posts.

Slowly making a visual novel called We Will Not See Heaven, demo is free. Sometimes I stream, or post adult things. Boys' love novel enthusiast. Take care, yeah?

💟💟💟
TECH CAN ONLY BE AS KIND TO US AS WE ARE TO ONE ANOTHER.


🖥️ blog
sherishaw.net/blog

rachelmae
@rachelmae

it boggles my mind that a company that is constantly under fire for scams and phishing and a host of other security issues would just casually drop masked links and make the problem worse. someone already abused this on the TCRF server to hide a link to some bitcoin bullshit and i am fucking seething.

Discord is, first and foremost, a chat program. it does not need full markdown support. i don't care if it pops up a confirmation dialog asking if you really want to go to the linked website; that is not enough, that has never been enough. they need to nuke this feature from orbit and maybe seriously consider going out of business because they have proven time and time again that they are absolutely not fit to run this service.


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @rachelmae's post:

So I fucked about with this and they did do some sanity checking, in that it won't convert the link if the link text is also a url. ie. you can't do [https://www.hotelfsex.com](http://this.linkishax.io) etc.

yeah and they foresaw some tricks but not enough:

  • xkeeper showed one
  • the character ⫽ is only a little bit off
  • and i just realized one can just split it into 2 links: [h](https://google.com/#)[ttps://blah.blah](https://google.com/)
    • the hash is because the embed parser would otherwise see it as https://google.com/https://google.com/ and thus fail, great coding

i would agree but on the other hand i like full markdown support and as long as you are somewhat sane and check links before mindlessly clickingon them (if you hover over a link it shows you a true URL), and have to go through a popup telling you what website you're going to, AND there's an embed showing the true contents of the website - I really don't think it's that big of a problem.

thing is the popup now shows up for every link clicked, not just masked ones, so people will tune it out
and embeds are just opengraph so they can be copy-pasted and nobody will be able to tell (unless it's something special like youtube or twitter); heck there are websites for making links with custom embeds that redirect to whatever without writing a gram of html

All the reasons for markdown support that I can think of are in service of using Discord as a repository for information. Since Discord isn't indexed by search engines and you generally can't even read-only access a discord server without publicly announcing yourself and surrendering personal information, those use-cases are inherently terrible. What a fine mess we're in.

lmao i was just thinking about how enabling all markdown in all messages (like headers and the like) is explicitly getting ready to really turn them into private little wikis of future lost information, it rules. we're fucked

It's even more glorious when you remember that Discord, like every other shitty tech company, is flirting with LLM (Ludicrous Liar Machine) technology.

Not only will the little faux-wikis be inaccessible to actual people, they will be hoarded and resold to institutional customers that wish to produce wiki-shaped spam.

It's ok! Discord has a little pop up that says WHOA THAT'S AN EXTERNAL LINK ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO GO THERE? On every single URL, which means it's safe to do dumb shit like this! They even WON'T LET YOU MIDDLE CLICK TO OPEN IN NEW TAB WITHOUT THE CLICKTHROUGH ANYMORE THEY'RE SERIOUS ABOUT SECURITY