How valuable are Shortcut Links to you?

[#1]

We planned to end support for Shortcut Links in Confluence 7.0, and intended to completely remove this feature in a future Confluence release.

Shortcut Links were introduced in Confluence 2.3 and provided a quick way to add links to websites in wiki markup. Shortcut links can only be configured by an administrator, are not easily discoverable, and seldom used by end users.

However, some customers had expressed disagreement for ending support for this feature. We would like to further understand the use cases of this feature, and the impact of ending support for this feature.

Any feedback about this feature is welcome! Kindly share your thoughts in the comments below. 

If you strongly rely on this feature, we would really appreciate a 30-40 mins chat with you (please email echan@atlassian.com to arrange a chat). 

Update 14 Aug 2019: 

Thanks everyone for your feedback on this issue. We've heard you, and will make no changes to Shortcut Links in Confluence 7.0.

[WolframS]

Hi ,

to be honest: for us that would be a little disaster, because we use it very intensively.
We use it at thousands of places where we link from internal part numbers to external databases / websites to get more, very important information about those parts.
We currently have a few thousand users who also use these links on a daily basis. The short links are extremely important for us because the external server addresses have changed three times within 6 years. Without the shortcuts we would (theoretically) have had to change a few thousand links manually.

" Shortcut links can only be configured by an administrator, are not easily discoverable, and seldom used by end users."

They are seldom used BECAUSE it's not that promoted. 

But if something is not used often, it does not mean that it is not needed. As you say: it is perhaps badly communicated and above all not known to the users - especially the end users could have an enormous advantage if they knew about something like this. But I know it from our own environment: Adminstrators have a completely different field of activity and can't imagine that the users could use shortlinks, that they could save a lot of work...

Me and the users in our company would be extremely happy if this feature would continue to exist. In my opinion it is rather a problem that the end users are asked too rarely - only the administrators, who have a completely different focus.

Nearly everyday I can see the different requirements for Confluence (or similar systems).

Please keep the shortlinks ;-)

Wolfram