Upgrading from Confluence 3.5.1 to 4.2.5 breaks all of our links to networked files and folders

Dave Donnelly [Sensata]

One of the uses we have for Confluence is to use it as a reference to documentation held on our network drives. This is an essential piece for functionality for us. I recently upgraded our Confluence instance from 3.5.1 to 4.2.5 and this had the effect of un-rendering all of the network hyperlinks and causing them to be displayed as text.

An example of the types of urls that encountered a problem are:

{noformat} /////network_drive/folder1/folder2 {noformat}

and

{noformat} //C:/folder1/folder2 {noformat}

and

{noformat} network_drive folder1 folder2 file.doc {noformat}

and here is a real one

{noformat} here| selanas02 ECUSystemDesign Systems Engineering Team Customer-independent Projects Presentations Demo_FrequencyResponseInvestigation_28Feb2012.pptx {noformat}

Mark Hrynczak

This ability is not currently available in Confluence 4.x.

There is an open feature request where this is being discussed: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-24665

The workaround, as mentioned on that ticket, is to insert the links within an HTML macro. Note that is a security risk, and you should decide whether you want to enable it on your instance.