New mention UI eats the text of the link

[MightyCreak]

Description

Can't make a link to a room with a text.

Steps to reproduce

If you write something like that:

Meet me [here](https://riot.im/develop/#/room/#test:matrix.org)

here isn't shown. Instead it's the room name that is.

Describe how what happens differs from what you expected.

The best solution would be to show the room icon but keep the link text instead of the room name.

Version information

Dev

• Platform: web

For the web app:

• Browser: Firefox 54
• OS: macOS
• URL: riot.im/develop

[t3chguy]

Please use the Issue template properly and open a new issue with it filled.

[MightyCreak]

Sorry, I messed up with my fingers, but I was editing it... (can't reopen the issue)

[lampholder]

I've tagged this as a bug and a feature... it's hard to know exactly the right thing to do with these, but it doesn't seem wholly unreasonable to just dictate that, within riot.im, links to rooms render as room pills, and for people's habits to change accordingly.

Though at the moment the alternative of typing Meet me here: [](https://riot.im/develop/#/room/#test:matrix.org) is fairly clunky.

@lukebarnard1 have we considered whether room URLs should automatically become pills, so people could type Meet me here: https://riot.im/develop/#/room/#test:matrix.org we'd still see a pill?

[lukebarnard1]

I think a better solution would be to only render a pill if the sending user has sent a [#alias](https://matrix.to/#/#alias) link where the text matches the URL.

Anything else could be rendered as a normal link, including @MightyCreak's here.

[lukebarnard1]

have we considered whether room URLs should automatically become pills

This feels unrelated here, but yes it has been considered. There's a comment in the code saying "move this up one line if we decide to make plain URLs pill-ified" 🙂 The other change would be to require the message composer to do the same of course.

[MightyCreak]

I don't understand how this (the bug I brought up) could be a feature.

I think that direct links like https://riot.im/develop/#/room/#test:matrix.org or its simpler form #test:matrix.org should be "pill-ified". Maybe even [](https://riot.im/develop/#/room/#test:matrix.org) could be pill-ified.

But when there's text in the square brackets, like that [this room](https://riot.im/develop/#/room/#test:matrix.org), the text is definitely more important than the link. But in this case we could show both the text and that it links to a room, like in this mockup I made (imagine the pointer is on the link, that's why the tooltip is showing):

Edit: I really like that because we also have a hint of which room it is thanks to the icon. Of course here, a mere "T" is not enough, but most of the rooms I follow do have a specific icon, which makes them easy recognizable.

[lukebarnard1]

@MightyCreak the problem with this is that it allows easy abuse because someone might put something other than "test". Also, it's not quite in-line with the design for this.

[MightyCreak]

I personally don't see it as a real threat. On the web, if you're unsure of the site you're browsing, you verify the links. It's the same here but with rooms.

And it's quite easy to detect a fishing here: if there is a room link in the text and it's different than the real room link.

But I get devs don't want to go that way. Thereby I propose to have a different UI for links to room with text. There is already the fact that the text is underlined when there is a text (in my mockup), which remembers that it's a texted link. Maybe the pill could only be on the left. Leave a regular link on the right, but still saying that this link points to a room.

[lampholder]

Pills exist to:

• help users discover/share new rooms
• help users have confidence that the link they're clicking is taking them somewhere they expect to go

We might experiment with more flexible pills in future, but let's stay simple for now - let's not let users replace the pill text with their own text.

However, to support @MightyCreak's usecase, lets render matrix.to links with custom link text as plain ol' regular links, without any pillification.

[daniellekirkwood]

We've taken a look at this feedback as we're again working on Pills. The solution that we've landed at should now be live in all our public test environments (Nightly builds for example).

I will close this issue as we've made and committed the product decisions on how to handle this use case.

If there's more feedback once playing with the new implementation, please go ahead and open another issue. You're welcome to tag me in it also :)