Internal hyperlinks continually breaking

Question

Hello community,

For some months now I have noticed that some internal hyperlinks to Confluence pages are breaking.

Here is the pattern.

(1) I see the link is broken and edit the hyperlink to fix it.

(2) I search for the page I wish to link to, save it and publish the page

(3) I test the hyperlink and it works.

(4) Some days later I return and the link is not working.  It still shows as a link, but clicking on it does nothing.  If I edit the link I see the Confluence URL is replaced with a #

There does not seem to be any consistency to which links this affects.  In some spaces around 50% of the links are affected, but the others work fine.

Links which I fix then break again.

Anyone else experiencing this very frustrating problem?

Rob

Levente Ambrus · Answer

Yes, I'm using links according to the manual, chapter "Link to an anchor, heading or section".

As I highlighted, I use edited links where the full URL is trimmed down to internal links which behave normally while previewing, then turn to a single # character when publishing.
BTW: in the meantime I noticed that links copied from headings Heading 1 work, and links offered for sub headings (e.g. Heading 3) never do.

I couldn't find any guidance in the manual for using internal links, or necessity to edit them anywhere in order to work as internal or external. Without any working ways (documented or not) I would say this is not the expected way.

Barbara Szczesniak · Answer

@Levente Ambrus As far as I know, the link with the # is for linking to an anchor macro you have inserted on the page. If you don't actually have an anchor with a name equal to the text after the #, then I would expect the behavior you are seeing.

According to this page (https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/insert-links-and-anchors/), you use the link to the heading that you copy as the link in your page—you don't edit it after inserting it.

Levente Ambrus · Answer

It is not changed by someone else.
Today I don't even need to wait. When editing, I use an internal link #myheading (link copied from the heading, converting to internal link by removing the page reference before the hash).
When I preview the page, it works.
When I publish, it doesn't and the browser reports that the link is only #.
I'm struggling with this for hours now nad cannot progress at all.