I use the Recent Comment widget on the sidebar to display recent comments on my posts in the form of “{authorLink} On {postLink}”. I noticed that the author link (links to website of whoever posted a comment on one of my posts) didn’t seem to work in all browsers accept Google Chrome (strangely enough).

On further investigation into the source of the page, I realised that for some reason the link generated was urlEncoded and not formated right.

e.g

‘http://www.example.com%27%20rel%3D%27external%20nofollow’

instead of

“http://www.example.com” rel=”external nofollow”

After a few minutes of debugging and digging around through the wordpress pages. I eventually found the source of the problem located on line 148 in category-template.php in the wp-includes folder.

$return = “<a href=’$url’ rel=’external nofollow’ class=’url’>$author</a>”;

I simply changed the line above to

$return = “<a href=\”$url\” rel=\”external nofollow\” class=\”url\”>$author</a>”;

and that sorted out the format of the output string and PRESTO the links work again.

* UPDATE – 9th February 2009

Just a heads up on this post.

Some WP users have reported that they’ve found the line in question in “comment-template.php” and not in “category-template.php”. So if you cant find it in one of them, it’s most likely in the other.