"Virgin should have tested their message on a range of handsets and popular SMS apps" ...or just not put punctuation after a URL. Personally I've trained myself to simply avoid any characters around a URL in any kind of comms, whether it's full stops, commas, quotes or brackets. Perhaps this caution comes from emailing, where you have to assume that any number of linkifying parsers, broken or otherwise, will do their best to mangle your message. SMS is the same. The people at Virgin Media who compose SMS messages for a living should have thought about adding the full stop and immediately realised it's not worth it.