This is my first ‘Help’ post, so I hope I’m in the right place. I occasionally find that links in my posts don’t display correctly. I think it has happened only with links to Wikipedia pages. I have an example of the problem here:
I am not sure what I’m doing wrong. I add the link using the ‘Add link’ button as with any others, and all other links from that same blog post work normally. What I did spot is that the link should have underscores, and in the image it seems to have removed all of those, so I wonder if that is the problem. I have however found links using underscores in some of my other blog posts and those work fine. Any idea what is going on?
Yeah, it looks like it’s caused by the underscores in the URL. We use Markdown for all our formatting, and it uses underscores for italic text, so it’s just rendering things weirdly. If you’re using the Rich Text editor, it may be making this a bit worse.
So I’d suggest switching to the Plain Text editor for this post, and moving the underscores for the italic text inside the brackets for the link. That means changing the link from this:
Thanks for taking the time to respond, much appreciated I know this platform is a single-person labour of love so I imagine you have a lot of demand on your time.
Your diagnosis actually directed me to an even easier solution, which was to remove the italics from the displayed word altogether, and that fixed it. As you said, I imagine the problem occurs when trying to combine a URL with underscores with a word that is itself also italicized. That will explain why some Wikipedia links (which always use underscores as far as I can tell) have worked for me in the past, but some haven’t.
I know this platform is a single-person labour of love so I imagine you have a lot of demand on your time.