Clickable links in chat

[Zeblote]

This is pretty straight forward, if I paste a link in chat it should be possible to click on it and open the page in the default browser.

[Tekky]

This could possibly be abused by spambots, that scan the server list and connect to servers in order to post advertisement links. Also, if the number of players on the server is high, it may also attract human spammers. The Factorio forums also has similar problems with spam (which is handled very well by the forum moderators).

Since there are not many people playing Factorio in multiplayer, I guess it wouldn't be worth the effort to reverse-engineer the Factorio multiplayer protocol in order to create such spam-bots. However, this may change after Factorio leaves early-access.

However, there is no danger for this to become a serious problem with password-protected servers. Therefore, admins of password-protected servers may want to enable such a feature. But, for the above reasons, it may become a problem to enable such a feature on public servers.

[mp0011]

Also:
- accidental clicks on such links can cause Factorio to unexpectedly minimize, loose focus, load browser (that, with low ram, can take a while...), and load some page. Everything while player character is not controlled by the human. This may be problem, if You want eg. click something near chat area, and suddenly some link just pops in chat...
- links should be somehow detected in a string, so possibly not every link would render properly, or some non-link strings would render as links.

[Zeblote]

This could possibly be abused by spambots, that scan the server list and connect to servers in order to post advertisement links. Also, if the number of players on the server is high, it may also attract human spammers. The Factorio forums also has similar problems with spam (which is handled very well by the forum moderators).

Since there are not many people playing Factorio in multiplayer, I guess it wouldn't be worth the effort to reverse-engineer the Factorio multiplayer protocol in order to create such spam-bots. However, this may change after Factorio leaves early-access.

However, there is no danger for this to become a serious problem with password-protected servers. Therefore, admins of password-protected servers may want to enable such a feature. But, for the above reasons, it may become a problem to enable such a feature on public servers.

The internet can be abused by spambots, so it should not exist. How's that a useful argument?

Spam bots are a total non-issue for people playing multiplayer with friends.
Besides, I don't see how a spam clickable link would be worse than other spam in the chat.

Also:
- accidental clicks on such links can cause Factorio to unexpectedly minimize, loose focus, load browser (that, with low ram, can take a while...), and load some page. Everything while player character is not controlled by the human. This may be problem, if You want eg. click something near chat area, and suddenly some link just pops in chat...

That's a good point, you wouldn't want to accidently tab out because someone pasted a link while you were aiming a grenade.
Could make clicking the link only work while the chat box is focused, or while holding down a key, or something else?

- links should be somehow detected in a string, so possibly not every link would render properly, or some non-link strings would render as links.

It's super easy to detect all potentially valid links by just searching for substrings starting with http:// or https://.

[Impatient]

Bumping this up

Despite all the counter arguments, this would be a great thing to have in mp.
I want to display a link to the discord channel to each joining player. I want to paste a link to the factorio calculator etc ... . At this time I have to set map markers/chart tags to put a link somewhere that at least can be copied.

For sure this should be implemented when we finally get the fully fledged chat interface ( viewtopic.php?f=6&t=63921 )