User added a .url file to a page

[Péter Varga]

Hi Everyone,

Sometimes we get notifications about someone adding files to a page, which is normal (we'd like to know if this happens), but in the excerpt of the notification mail I see that it is a .url file.

The .url file is also available in the Attachments menu, but it has no displayable preview. This exemplary page contains a ToC with a lot of links to child pages, but it  contains only this one .url as attachment.
My question is, how and why are these .url files attached to a page? Can it be turned off (there are users who are disturbed by these mails). I would like to know the reasons behind this notification service, how it works and how is it configurable.

Thank you in advance!

Best regards,
Peter

[Alfa Product Team · Accepted solution]

We've been seeing these files appearing a lot recently, and we have tracked this down to Chrome users.

When you click on a link and move the mouse, chrome treats that as a "drag and drop" request to send a .url file for that link.

Confluence accepts file attachments for upload via dropping them anywhere on a page.

So now, every time a user clicks the mouse button down and slightly moves their mouse, unless they hit escape (to cancel the drag and drop) we get a .url file uploaded.

Not sure if this is something new in Chrome, or new in Confluence (we recently upgraded to 7.13) but it isn't replicable when using firefox.

(n.b. it also happens if people click and drag an image on a page... then we get a new version of the image file uploaded).

[Péter Varga]

We couldn't replicate it with Chrome either, but the cursor changes to an "add" logo when dragging a link, it just does nothing after that. Pictures are indeed shown as uploaded (as a new version), but the attachemnts section doesn't expand.

I think it was caused mostly by a specific Chrome version and maybe it was fixed in the meantime (the last notification about this phenomenon was on the 1st December).

I asked the colleagues to pay close attention to this nonetheless.

Thank you for your help!

[Deleted user]

We're also seeing this issue with Chromium Edge. I have not locked to a specific version yet.

We recently decommissioned Firefox and move solely to Edge and this issue began occurring

[Sander Hagendoorn]

We have a similar issue; when someone comments on a document in preview mode, sometimes a comments.0.url file is attached to the page containing the document.

Seems to have started happening with a recent update (we're using server 7.12.1).

[Johannes Stadler]

That's a good hint with the comments, thanks for the info. It's also happening for us since we updated to 7.13.2.

[John Price]

We are seeing this pretty regularly as well.  I don't think it's preview mode as for us it's users viewing our internal support docs.  Example:I haven't submitted a support case, but will watch this page to see if anyone solves it.

[Johannes Stadler]

I think it's related to https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFSERVER-75002