Reddit/LW autolink any use in a comment of a HTTP hyperlink like 'http://www.lesswrong.com'. This is a huge time saver for users since often there is no appropriate anchor text (or the user doesn't want to provide one), and it's easier than writing 'http://www.lesswrong.com'.

Reddit, but not LW, will also autolink any use in a comment of an HTTPS link. So 'https://plus.google.com' will be autolinked just like 'http://plus.google.com'. This is useful for the same reasons.

LW, however, renders the link as an unclickable plain text string. This is harmful for the above reasons.

HTTPS links used to be rare, but have become ever more common as time passes, especially given the Snowden leaks. Google+ defaults to HTTPS, Dropbox defaults to HTTPS, people using HTTPS Everywhere-like browser plugins will get tons of HTTPS links, and even ordinary document websites like Wikipedia are reportedly switching to HTTPS as a default. The inconvenience will only continue to increase with time.

I assume that the matching in the LW codebase is being done by a regexp or something. It should be pretty easy to tweak the code which autolinks 'http://' to also auto-link 'https://' as well.

(I could've sworn that I'd reported this issue in the past, but I did some searches of 'https' and 'gwern' in this bugtracker and couldn't find it. My apologies if it turns out I had in fact reported it before.)

Fixed. See e.g.:

http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/j9j/december_monthly_bragging_thread/a5hl

Thanks.