MENTION processing breaks emails addresses


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It's pretty clearly unexpected and unintended behaviour!

On the contrary, it isn't very plausible that they didn't expect this behavior - even the most basic of testing would have revealed it. Thus, it is a conscious choice to allow it to happen.

In general, they'd probably say that putting your e-mail address in the clear in a publicly readable place (where spammers can collect it) is not a highly valued capability, and doing something else with @ acceptable.
 

On the contrary, it isn't very plausible that they didn't expect this behavior - even the most basic of testing would have revealed it. Thus, it is a conscious choice to allow it to happen.

In general, they'd probably say that putting your e-mail address in the clear in a publicly readable place (where spammers can collect it) is not a highly valued capability, and doing something else with @ acceptable.

I disagree on two grounds - firstly, basic testing wouldn't necessarily have revealed it - if they never put email addresses in vBulletin posts, they could easily have just not thought about testing for it.

Secondly, if it was a deliberate feature, it would have been called out (even as a warning - "installing this will not allow you to use mailto email addresses in vBulletin posts"). And who would put in a deliberate feature that pointlessly broke email links, which would never be intended to be a mention anyway?

So I stick by my assertion - unexpected and unintended behaviour, thanks to lazy parsing of the posted text to create Mention's.

Disappointing that they are the kind of developer who won't own up to it and fix it either.
 

I disagree on two grounds - firstly, basic testing wouldn't necessarily have revealed it - if they never put email addresses in vBulletin posts, they could easily have just not thought about testing for it.

If the Mention feature is a third-party hack, perhaps. Otherwise, implausible. vBulletin, in general, operates too well for their QA process to be that shabby. If they were such goobers as to not test, "what happens when they use the character in it's most common application," then they'd have failed in testing so many other things that the system would crash every three hours or so. IMHO.

Secondly, if it was a deliberate feature, it would have been called out

There's a middle ground between deliberate and "unexpected and unintended". Meaning: They didn't actively set out to break e-mails, but honestly don't care if e-mails break. If it is internally deemed "acceptable behavior" it is by definition not a bug.

Failure to call it out is a separate issue - such messages to customers are not often written by those who write and test the code. That'd be a documentation bug, not a coding bug.
 




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