iframes, stahp!
 

Apparently I cannot post a link to a YouTube video without the forum trying to convert it to an <iframe> embedding the linked video in the page. I hate embedded videos. I don't want to see them. I don't want to subject other people to seeing them. Please stop vBulleting from converting all YouTube URLs -- even ones I explicitly link with [url] tags and non-URL text! -- into dirty iframes!

Also, whatever you guys are using to convert YouTube URLs into embedded videos seems to have several technical problems, in addition to the basic problem (for me) of its existence:

(1) It converts YouTube URLs that are inside a [ URL="insert link here" ] tag, resulting in an <iframe> tag in the middle of an <a> tag's "href" attribute, which breaks both the link and the (unwanted) iframe.

(2) It tries to follow short URLs to figure out if they redirect to a YouTube URL, to convert those into embedded videos... but it doesn't actually work (at least for TinyURL) and ends up making a link labeled "null" that points to "null". Example here:
http://www.wowinterface.com/forums/s...819#post288819

Can't you just add a new BBCode tag for embedding -- eg. [ embed ] or [ video ] -- instead of using this weird buggy conversion thing?

This is still a problem over a year later, and it's still just as annoying. :(

It shouldn't do it with any URLs. In your example post you linked, the page display is literally broken. Adding an [ embed ] tag for BBCode in vBulletin appears to be trivial (see http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=301799) so I don't see why this broken hack is still around over a year after it was reported as broken. URLs that point to images don't turn into embedded images -- there's a separage [ img ] tag for that -- so it doesn't make sense for URLs that point to videos to turn into embedded videos, especially when the implementation is broken.

If you guys are really all too busy to spend 2 minutes fixing the problem, I hereby volunteer my time, though I suspect it would actually take longer to give me the necessary permissions (and presumably remove them afterward) than it would be to just fix it yourself.

Also, replying to your post in the other thread:

Even an insecure HTTP link will produce an unwated effect if it's not "raw":

example

That should be a link displaying the text "example". While you could maybe argue that someone posting a raw Youtube URL in their post wants an embedded video (though I would disagree) there's just no way you can assume someone entering a Youtube URL as the attribute of a URL tag wants an embedded video -- they clearly want the contained text to be a link to the video.

So how are we supposed to embed a video in a post now if you don't want to force someone to click a link to view it?

Dolby (or some other admin) just needs to add an "embed" tag, which looks like it should take about 90 seconds:
http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=301799

Just quickly looking at that bbcode I might need to do some sanitizing. Looking at that I might be able to do some xss or at the very least make the iframe point to something other than YT. I'll test this first.

Dolby.... not sure if it would be a solution you would be amicable with, but there's an addon for vBulletin that allows the user to hide specific lines of text/link/code in a post. It's kind of like a spoiler alert thing. Hard to explain, but you just wrap the line of text with the spoiler tag, so then it hides it. If someone wants to view it they just click on the little unhide pin.

This works amazingly well for threads with heavy youtube links because it allows the thread page to load quickly without loading all those videos (as long as the poster uses the hide feature).

This way you can still keep it the way it is, but posters can now hide the link. I personally like having the vids embed, but will be happy to hide them if I post one.