After digging into this briefly, the link-detecting regex logic in appengine/chromium_status is ... a mess. GK should have an actual API or something instead of this ad-hoc jumble of heuristics.

It might be better to have the apps that post messages to *-status.appspot.com just include real links, instead of having the status app try to read minds.

The following revision refers to this bug:
  https://chromium.googlesource.com/infra/infra/+/f7cf1ac1311e63cb199c4ca5d606e6dab5a97b9f

commit f7cf1ac1311e63cb199c4ca5d606e6dab5a97b9f
Author: Sean McCullough <seanmccullough@chromium.org>
Date: Fri Mar 24 21:28:43 2017

[*-status.appspot.com] try to be smarter about linking builds

Bug: 704974
Change-Id: If168ab26ad38cbbd14259c6a1a9e11bee6a79e3e
Reviewed-on: https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/459228
Reviewed-by: Aaron Gable <agable@chromium.org>
Commit-Queue: Sean McCullough <seanmccullough@chromium.org>

[modify] https://crrev.com/f7cf1ac1311e63cb199c4ca5d606e6dab5a97b9f/appengine/chromium_status/appengine_module/chromium_status/status.py

Looks like this did not fix the app. I've deployed newest version to chromium-status.appspot.com, but this didn't help.

Deleted: SN0guhnnDx6.png 239 KB

	SN0guhnnDx6.png 239 KB View Download

(Lowering priority since I don't think this is P1) 

But if you disagree, feel free to raise the priority again. My long-term solution to this will probably be to create a geenric, shared free text parsing element for ChOpsUI and have Polymer frontends use that element to format user inputs. 

I do think there's value in keeping the random free text parsing since it's convenient, especially for inherently unstructured user input. But it should be automatically tested and standardized (so users can learn our schemes).