Smart Links, a richer way to hyperlink

88 comments

Tina Hutchinson August 5, 2020

Great tip @Vitalii Saienko , and I see the link text can be edited further from there, if desired. Thank you! 

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Michael Kuhl _Appfire_
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August 5, 2020

At a glance it seems like Smart Link Embeds are using the source's OOB embed functionality, but not implementing a custom view of the content.  Am I correct in that perception?

James Dellow
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August 19, 2020

Do the smart links to Confluence pages work with the Excerpt macro at all?

Ciprian Haldan August 24, 2020

Hi, Is this feature available for Confluence yet ? Is this only for confluence cloud ?

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jim August 27, 2020

How do you turn this off?

 

If I have a paragraph of text with 4-5 links after it, I now have no way of copying and pasting this information elsewhere.

 

This insidious 'lock-in' is awful.  

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Nicolas Casel
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October 13, 2020

Thanks for this introduction.

For more detail on how Smart Links works, check out our support documentation

A link to the support documentation (or any page about versioning, pricing, etc.) would have been welcome :-)

Where can I find about versioning and pricing?

Abbas Dar December 15, 2020

Does this include documentation as links too?

Carsten Blüm December 17, 2020

It should be noted that (according tohttps://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-questions/Smart-Links-for-self-hosted-GitLab/qaq-p/1541575) smart links only work for cloud-hosted GitLab instances, not for on-premises instances. Which, unfortunately, renders this type of smart links more or less useless, as self-hosting is GitLab’s USP.
Apart from that, sounds like a nice addition, although for the moment, without on-premises-GitLab-support, we won’t have any benefits from it.

And a remark regarding the posting’s last sentence: when referring to the documentation, wouldn’t it be useful to just link to the documentation?

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Patrick Nelson January 11, 2021

This is clunky; it's a pain to have to press `ctrl+z` to undo. Is there a way to disable this behavior by default? I can appreciate that this can be useful at times, but it's slow and inefficient.

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Vlad April 21, 2021

@Jonno Katahanas  Where are the settings for these? Our links randomly started turning into cards, we need them all to be URLs. How do we turn this off pls

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Bill_P May 3, 2021

Please disable this for links that are not in your list, we use external links to our products and instead of see the link we now get this "Smart Link" that basically takes away any context link has. I have to continuously switch them to normal links.


https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Software-questions/Is-there-a-way-to-disable-inline-links/qaq-p/1673119?utm_source=atlcomm&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=immediate_general_reply&utm_content=topic

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Bill_P May 3, 2021

1. Why was this "feature" introduced for unknown external links (ones not in your list)?

2. What problem is it solving or how it is helping people?

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Vinko Grgic May 3, 2021

Hi Atlassian team, I'm with @Tina Hutchinson on this one.

Is there a way I can change the default behaviour for smart links?

Currently, and especially in Jira, the default behaviour seems to be "display inline".

And I find myself so much of the time wanting the "display URL".

So in my case, this feature is causing me more manual labour than if it wasn't "smart".

I'd prefer that default behaviour is in the priority order as per the dropdown:

  1. URL
  2. inline
  3. card

Please let me know.

It's a small, but daily nuisance.

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Yuna Kim May 11, 2021

It automatically turns into Inline view, but I want the URLs to display as the way it is automatically, instead of changing every single link from inline to display. How can I do this? 

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Martin Sauter May 19, 2021

While Smart Links are helpful in some situations, we usually don't want them because a) many pages we are linking to do not have really helpful page titles and b) fetching the title takes time and slows down the Confluence experience.

So PLEASE make this feature optional! We have to revert each and every link we paste into Confluence manually (CTRL-Z). Give us a preference setting in the user profile how to treat links by default.

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Misato T May 20, 2021

How do we turn OFF Smart Links? Our JIRA Service Desk instance does not have formatting and outgoing messages with any URLs are breaking and unusable to customers.

A basic URL, such as google.com, now appears like this with Smart Link: [http://www.google.com|http://www.google.com|smart-link] 

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Bill_P May 20, 2021

Is there a User Agent we can block on our servers to disable this feature from fetching?

In testing if you add a dead link it does not do this "Smart linking" so i theory If i block your requests then it will not auto update the link. This only help for servers I have control of but at least it 80% of the links I do not want updated.

Elissa June 20, 2021

Is there a way to see more details on Jira ticket cards in Confluence? At the moment there seems to be a lot of wasted space, but it would be great to see descriptions, attachments, comments, priorities, etc. 

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Wagner Carvalho June 24, 2021

Why smartlink is not working here? I paste the Xd link but is not show the options to display the preview

Mikel King July 15, 2021

Actually I find it to be the worst feature ever. I would really like the ability to turn this off on my cloud environment. Pressing cntrl/cmd-z is fine for a single link, but if you are pasting in a table full of URLs it's not really an option.

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Chris Shenton July 27, 2021

Smart Links is like Spam: it should be opt-in, instead of opt-out-for-every-damn-link.

It makes it impossible to see different URLs for same/similar sites/pages -- and for web developers, that makes it worse than bad.

At least disable this behavior for links outside the Atlassian ecosystem. Please.

David at David Simpson Apps
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Marketplace Partners provide apps and integrations available on the Atlassian Marketplace that extend the power of Atlassian products.
July 29, 2021

Hi @Jonno Katahanas,

I notice that smart links don't render for anonymous users on my Confluence instance.

So when adding a YouTube video embed, you'd end up with something that at first glance looks like it works, but if you then logout and have another look at the page, you get the following:

Screenshot 2021-07-29 at 13.40.01.png

As smart links have overridden the widget macro behaviour for auto-converting URLs, this is a step backwards in product functionality. Something which was once ridiculously easy now requires cognitive effort.

You now need to remember the use cases for which smart links work and then behave accordingly.

Phillip Terry August 4, 2021

Our Gitlab is behind SSO. Even if I authenticate and refresh the Confluence tab, the Smartlink doesn't display the Gitlab content. Any suggestions on how to get this to work?

Andrew Boyd August 5, 2021

As someone who writes a lot of detailed requirements and technical planning documents that contain URLs that I want to simply stay unchanged, the way I type them in, I absolutely detest this compulsory feature.

Lane Cipriani August 11, 2021

Please offer an option to opt-out of these smart links - they're driving me crazy. When we type / paste a URL into confluence documentation, we *want* it to be clear, not obfuscated behind the target web title which is often meaningless.

It's fine for Confluence internal page links; it's terrible for external site links.

Having to undo, and reformat EVERY SINGLE LINK in an article wastes time, not saves it.

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