If I understand correctly, there are two issues here:
1. there is the question of whether autodetection is helpful
2. there is an issue of pasting links
The only autodetection happening is when, for example, I mention google.com in a sentence. Wagn detects the domain and makes a link. Note that this is NOT a link if you look at it in the editor -- only when rendered. This is clearly useful in a lot of contexts and is broadly liked by most wagneers. it would not be tough to write a module to turn it off, but I really don't think this is related to the problem at hand.
I think the issue you're describing is really just about pasting. If you highlight, copy, and paste an html link from a web page to tinyMCE (or any editor based on editable divs), then what is copied as a link remains a link. There is no autodetection involved, just direct copying.
There are a couple of simple workarounds:
1. instead of copying by highlighting, you can right click on the link you want to copy and choose "copy link address" (or whatever your browser's version of that is). This copies only the address, not the entire html link.
2. if you must copy html, then before pasting into the wysiwyg, you can paste it into a simple text editor (like this discussion box, the url bar, or any other non-wysiwyg editor) and then re-copy.
In addition, we can probably make some improvements on the actual link processing. This is actually a very similar problem to the inclusion problem you were having with html syntax; perhaps we should just strip html from the link syntax, too.
Finally, we do intend to build link and inclusion editors for the 1.13 release.
Okay, to the autodetect isn't quite what I thought it was. It's the second one that's the issue I really mean.
I'm actually not pasting from a webpage. I'm pasting what I copied from the browser bar when I ran into this. I don't know of a cleaner way to get a URL than copying it from there. I use Chrome if that's any help.
So what I did in my example was switch to my 8tracks tab, highlight the address and hit Ctrl-C. Then I came back here, started typing in the example, typed the square brackets, hit Ctrl-V, and typed the bar and some more text before closing with square brackets.
wow, really? I just did that (in the example) and didn't have that problem. what os are you using?
you haven't tweaked your tinymce configuration have you?
I wouldn't know how to change my tinymce configuration. Windows 7/8. I just tried to edit the Example box and it did the same thing. Although when I try to paste the link in this box it just shows up as unlinked text while the editor is still open.
wait, isn't that exactly what we want?
Yes, but the discussion box behaves differently from the Example box.
oh, oh, I get you now. I guess I'll have to try to get a windows box to see if I can reproduce this. definitely is not standard behavior (and it sounds really annoying)
What OS are you using?
mac osx 10.7.5
but nobody has ever reported this behavior. it sounds really strange.
Yeah, my friend using a Mac gets the same result as you.
It's not a Windows thing, it's a Chrome thing. Specifically, a URL copied from the Chrome address bar will paste as a link. If I copy from a Firefox address bar and paste into the editor in either Chrome or Firefox, it pastes as text. If I copy from a Chrome address bar and paste into the editor in either Chrome or Firefox, it pastes as a link.
I'm using Chrome, so perhaps it's a Chrome-on-Windows thing?
Must be. Although I'm guessing that doesn't suggest any solutions?