Bug report: FTP links don't work

[NE2]

There doesn't seem to be a place to report bugs or for general forum discussion.

The forum adds a bogus http to the beginning of FTP links: ftp://wydot-ftp.dot.state.wy.us/2009%20Maintenance%20Section%20Ref.%20Book/2009%20Maintenance%20Section%20Reference%20Book.pdf

Even if you use URL code it does that to the underlying link: ftp://wydot-ftp.dot.state.wy.us/2009%20Maintenance%20Section%20Ref.%20Book/2009%20Maintenance%20Section%20Reference%20Book.pdf

[rickmastfan67]

It's an SMF problem.  Nothing we can do about it.

You could try to report it as a bug @ Simple Machines website: http://www.simplemachines.org/

But I don't think they will fix it for the 1.1.x series.  Maybe in the 2.0 series.

[vdeane]

I doubt it's a real priority for them.  I didn't even know ftp links existed until I read complaints about this bug on this forum!  I can't think of a single non-DOT site that uses them; they're mostly a throwback to the days before 100% of the websites that most people use had a prefix of http://www.

EDIT: and the stupid SMF software decided to turn that into a link 

[J N Winkler]

I can think of plenty of non-DOT sites which do use FTP.  GIS data providers, universities, research labs, and various types of corporations all have FTP servers.  Within government, FTP is used not just for transportation-related information but also for purposes related to environmental regulation, education, etc.  FTP has to an extent been supplanted by dedicated secure file transfer solutions (many of which are HTTP- or HTTPS-based and work by having the data provider "send" the data to a specific named person), but it is still in wide use because it is robust and easy to set up.

Anyway, as Rickmastfan67 says, we are at the mercy of the providers of SMF.  I am not sure what to suggest other than calling out FTP URLs so people can cut and paste around the false HTTP protocol identifier.