When did YouTube embeds stop working for anonymous users?

David at David Simpson Apps

I was surprised to find that all my YouTube embeds are broken if the end user is not logged in. This used to work just fine. Logged in users are not affected.

Here's a screenshot of an example YouTube embed:

This is suboptimal when hosting documentation on Confluence Cloud.

Are other people experiencing this problem?

David at David Simpson Apps

Oh, it looks like they probably never worked, but I hadn't noticed this because I was logged in.

Atlassian Support recommends not using smart links when authoring content for anonymous users, instead using the widget macro.

As I've previously noted, this side-effect of smart links is a step backwards in product functionality. Something which was once ridiculously easy now requires cognitive effort.

You now need to remember the use cases for which smart links work and then behave accordingly.