Different default selection for a labelled "External link" for comments and descriptions

Lukas Kemmer

When adding an external link in Jira it is convenient to type the link label, say "my external link", mark it and click the "Link→External Link" button. This replaces the text "my external link" with the link format: 

[my external link|http://example.com]

It would be convenient if this set the "http//example.com" text as the selection, since that is always what you will want to replace when the external link is created from an active text selection, and it would allow simply pasting the URL.

In our data center hosted Jira (v 9.12.7), the label instead gets highlighted, which I think could be considered a (small) bug:

In the cloud version at jira.atlassian.com (v9.12.8) it appears nothing is highlighted at all after inserting an external link, which is less of a bug than the behavior I observe on our hosted Jira, but also inconvenient.

How can I bring this to Atlassians attention? Is there a better way to insert labelled external links?

Mykenna Cepek

Hi Lukas, welcome to the Atlassian Community forums.

I too have been frustrated with how the WYSIWYG markup editor works with hyperlinks. A few things you might want to experiment with:

• Compare behavior between the "Visual" and "Text" views of fields that accept markup.
• Try using copy/paste to insert links instead. For example, select and copy the hyperlink as shown elsewhere, and paste that into the Jira markup field. Sometimes these don't show as I expect in the "Text" view, but they seem to work fine in the "Visual" view and after being saved.

To "bring things to Atlassian's attention" we use the JAC...

   https://jira.atlassian.com/secure/Dashboard.jspa?selectPageId=10440

...where you can search for existing bugs and suggestions, vote on them (which matters!) and also contribute workarounds and such. Items with the most votes get Atlassian's attention.