The Glade 4.0

Youtu.be is a 3rd-party URL shortener. The [yt] tag won't work with it. Youtube URLs have to be literally in this form for it to work:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXXXXXXXXXX

Actually, you can have stuff after the XXXXXXXXXXX, but not before. I.e., this works:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXXXXXXXXXX&x=ABC

This doesn't:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?x=ABC&v=XXXXXXXXXXX

This is a technical limitation with PHPBB3. Hunting for an arbitrary URL getvars in arbitrary order is just beyond the capabilities of the BBCode engine. As, for that matter, is matching the same pattern but with different prefixes. BBCode is a simplified front-end for PHP regexes. You really need a full regex engine to do that kind of thing. The PHPBB3 system doesn't expose that functionality to the admin control panel for what amounts to security reasons. A badly written regex could open your site to all kinds of XSS/injection style attacks.

The only way to accomplish this would be patching/modding it in at the PHP level. I'm not aware of any mods for dealing with Youtube's increasingly ... crufty URL formats (I've looked), and I'm really not familiar enough with the PHPBB3 codebase to feel comfortable hacking something like that in myself.

I'm hoping they'll include some more sophisticated BBCode options whenever PHPBB4 rolls around, but until then...bleh. Youtu.be shortening might actually be the most graceful answer. I can add a tag for that easily, but it will have to be a separate tag from [yt], I'm afraid.

URL shorteners were thought to have lived their heyday earlier this year when every other startup was in the link shortening business. After a while though, it became clear that there was simply no space for all of them and with Bit.ly the unchallenged leader in the market things looked settled. Last week though, things changed dramatically as both Google and Facebook entered onto the scene with their own take on URL shorteners. And it's not over yet, YouTube has also come up with its own shortener, and this one too is slightly different than the others.

“It's all the rage: link shorteners to ensure that those useful URLs you're sharing don't take up too much precious character count while also giving you an inkling of what you're about to click on. Well, we've just launched youtu.be as a shortener for YouTube video links -- and nothing but YouTube links -- so you can rest assured that when you see a link with this URL, you are indeed about to click on a YouTube video,” Vijay Karunamurthy, engineering manager at YouTube wrote.

YouTube made some interesting choices when implementing its own shortener compromising length for usefulness. The new shortened URLs aren't exactly that short, certainly not compared to the standard Bit.ly not to mention J.mp. Apart from the custom address it uses, youtu.be, which could have been at least a couple of characters shorter, what comes after could have also been shorter.

The dev team decided though to use the existing unique video ID of the clip as part of the shortened link. So, instead of the normal URL which looks like this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cebbvcMW5Uo, you get something like this youtu.be/cebbvcMW5Uo. This approach has the advantage that, because the video ID is in the link, third-party developers can use it for things like thumbnails or even embed it inline. You can use the AutoShare function, which shares the videos you upload or watch to Twitter, Facebook and the likes, to see the shortened links in action. Another option is to create the link manually by adding the video ID to the end of 'youtu.be/'.

holy crap that reaction time isn't human!