[open] Custom Links
 

A while back I read through this page on the wiki

http://wiki.esoui.com/How_to_create_custom_links

Basically I think it would be awesome if support for custom links in chat could be worked into the chat system. I've heard rumors that once upon a time they were supported, but I never really heard why they were removed.

This little addition would open up a lot of possibilities for cleanly sharing fixed data between players with the same addon without blasting the chat with unreadable garbage.

If this is never going to happen, I'd at least like to know why it's a no go since it was obviously planned for at some point.

From a roleplayer's view I'd love to get this too so we get the possibilities to share our clothes information or build a kind of background story etc.

From the addon's dev view I'd love to get this too so we can share our skills, champion point information etc. somehow to group/guild members or give advices somehow.

The negative aspect:
One could maybe somehow start "mallicious" stuff by sending a link which will trigger something in an addon, like "if you click this link the addon will destroy your gear" :rolleyes:
This would also be able to do right now so it's not something what addon devs would do. So no worries.

@Zos:
If we can find a good way to do this I'd love to help testing etc.

I don't think we need to add anything for this to be possible. You can look at ZO_LinkHandler.lua for examples of all the link types we've added. You can just make a new one of those and encode all the data you need to and then unpack it on the other side.

That was the case long ago, but it no longer works like that. Currently when you send a link via chat that is not one of the types "recognized" by the game, the link will not be rendered as a link and instead shows the plain markup.
The only thing addons can do is filter the chat message and re-add the link locally. That way it will show up as a custom link, but for users that do not have the addon it will look strange.

My current approach for the problem is to hijack a book link and add custom data inside. That way it will show as "[An ancient scroll]" for users that do not use my addon and as a custom link for anyone with the addon :D

I can confirm that custom links show up in the chat as |H...:...:...|h plaintext links. If you scrape the text from the chat event and print it with d() then it actually renders as a clickable link with the expected [link text] format, but the obvious downside is that the link text is still left in the public chat.

I've also never seen a custom link in zone/group/guild or any other chat from any addons. Since I can think of dozen's of uses for custom links and I'm not even creative, I think it's reasonable to assume that custom links don't work right and haven't for years...

Edit: Also thank you for taking notice. I guess I always assumed that custom links were disabled intentionally...

Any chance of this being addressed again in the future? It sounded like Chip was surprised to hear that custom links (or even official player links) don't display in chat properly, but I guess it's a super low priority?