The Grammar of Arabic

AzizMostafa AzizAli

https://medium.com/type-thursday/the-grammar-of-arabic-c888db917424

Kent Lew

My interpretation of the fact that you have been the lone [sporadic] voice on this issue over the years, Joe, is that most of the regular forum-goers here must not in fact mind bare URLs of this nature.

Especially when the construction of the URL is relatively easy to interpret as “An article on Medium by Type Thursday about the Grammar of Arabic” with an implied “which might interest some folks here.”

(Reminder: Accepted practice evolves over time and tends to follow the whim and will of the majority, for better or worse — which I realize will, of course, lead to the total collapse of civilization; but we’re living in the end-times, after all, so there you go.)

Paul Miller

I don't mind bare URL's but I'm not inclined to actually click on them, so I just ignore them.  No problemo!

John Hudson

[Okay, so this has nothing to do with the grammar of Arabic script, but Joe's latest intervention has me thinking about this issue. Specifically, the comment

a-bare-url-that-is-itself-a-link-implying-in-fact-that-real-link-text-could-have-been-provided

Creating link text and linking a URL to that in the TypeDrawers user interface is a several step process. The steps are easy, but when software automatically identifies and links pasted URLs, as here, the steps appear unnecessary to a lot of people who aren't necessarily thinking about accessibility (which is the strong case for properly formatted link text: this isn't just a matter of what Joe likes). I am guilty of this myself.

Where I disagree with Joe is that this is or should be a matter for human moderator intervention or 'punishment'. Forum software exists that can (reasonably) intelligently preview links, so it doesn't seem to me farfetched to suggest that software should be able to construct link text when it identifies a URL and automatically creates a link.]

John Savard

joeclark said:

We have six or eight or a dozen “moderators” to make sure my complaints about this base level of incompetence are punished and no corrections are ever made, either systemically or to individual posts.

Well, no correction needs to be made to the post by Aziz Mostafa. The URL is valid, the site in question contains an on-topic article.

A posting consisting of a bare URL can potentially be spam, and can potentially be used to entice users into clicing on a page that will infect their computers. So it may well be reasonable, for example, to prevent anyone from making such a post as his or her first post on the site.

Once someone is well established by the content of his or her posts as a positive participant in the forum, however, enforcing a requirement that URLs must be accompanied by text may only consume bandwidth for no good reason.

And Aziz Mostafa has made a number of posts to this forum demonstrating knowledge of typography, and so he is a real person, and not a spambot. Of course, computers do sometimes get infected, but I can see this kind of implication as at least being perceived as a personal insult. I certainly do agree with you that the site maintainers should devote due attention to site security, including the security of the peple using the site, but your post in this thread indicates why moderators could possibly have a legitimate issue with your posts as well.

Dyana Weissman

Do not derail threads. Anyone from here on out who is not commenting on the interview with Kourish Beigpour will have their post buried and they will receive a warning.