confluence Anchors not working after upgraade from 4.2 to 5.3

Peter T

After upgrade the pages with existing anchors does not work anymore. The Anchor macro is still there but a # was added to the name of the anchor and thus all the links to this anchor does not work.

We are talking about thousands of anchor. Any resolution but doing some DB updates?

Giuliano C.

Heya Peter,

By taking a look at the behaviour, it looks like one of our known bugs:

After migration from 3.5.13 to 4.2.x, 4.3.x and 5.5.1 In page anchor displays with #anchorname instead of just anchorname

Through this one, we can see that we have a workaround to remove the hash from the link (as you have asked) and basically, it would be:

You can inject SQL query to remove the hash from the link. For example this is the SQL query for MySQL.

UPDATE BODYCONTENT SET BODY = REPLACE(BODY, 'link-body>#', 'link-body>') WHERE BODY LIKE '%ac:anchor%link-body>#%';

Hope it helps ya,

Giu