Is there a way to disable inline links (Bug report SmartLinks applying to all links?)

[Bill_P]

Is there a way to disable inline links, they are really unuser friendly.

Reasons:

1. I want to see what this link actually goes not not just the icon and title, if I did not want that then I would add different text.

2. Holding CTRL on a link and clicking does not behave link a normal weblink it should open in a new tab or window not over jira. (I personally never want to leave jira when I click external links)

VOTE HERE for a fix:
https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-72429

[Bill_P · Accepted solution]

Its here on the user setting.

YourUserProfile > Profile > Preferences > External links.
https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRASERVER-9380 

[Ero Gray]

Following. We're running several helpdesks for websites, where referring clearly to exact URLs is a fundamental part of our support process. Hiding link destinations is never, ever, ever going to be what we want to do by default and it's causing my coworkers to cuss at the screen a lot.

[Leah]

EXACTLY!

[Chris Pagel]

has this been solved. would love to have a way to see the actual url all the time?

[Maarten Kuiper]

This has not been solved. But if you'd like for it to be solved, upvote this issue in the Jira issue tracker:

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-72429

[martinmichaelfrederiksen]

It is the most shitty feature ever invented.

[StingyJack]

@Chris Pagel  - See this comment for at least one way to disable this  https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-72429?focusedCommentId=2950243&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel#comment-2950243

[Kimmo]

@StingyJackI really want to click the like button on that comment but I just can't. I find it absurd that we need to apply userscripts to be able to properly input plaintext URLs in text fields in a SaaS product that we pay through the nose for. These kind of "features" have no right to exist.

[Sam Lehman]

I too find this 'feature' very annoying for external links.

[Kevin Cassidy]

agreed. If you're going to introduce a 'feature' have the ability to disable it or at least not make it a default

[Zaheer]

This is so annoying and time wasting. Imagine you paste 10+ URLs in a comment the browser stops responding as each URL is being processed and then having to go through that 2-click process on each link to convert it to a plain URL.

Such wishful features must be turned-off by default and only enabled by users who have some real use case for them.

Its a pity to rollout such features without having "disable" option in place first.

We expect better things from Atlassian NOT worst.

[Denise Spangler]

1. Yes I think we'd all be so happy if the default could be 'Display URL' instead of 'Display inline' as there hasn't been a single time when I've actually used the inline version. All work we ever do involves being able to see what the actual URLs are. 

[Rui Duan]

Same issue here. I would recommend to make the "Display Url" as default and "Display Inline" as an option.

[Brian Jackson]

They added this in Trello and Confluence now with no options to disable them. I'm fine if someone prefers it on, but at least give us an option to turn these off. There is not one single instance where I want this, and it breaks so many of my workflows. 

I'm actually looking at migrating away from Trello and Confluence for this reason alone. It's been a great 8 years. But you obviously don't use your own product anymore. Time to move on.

[Richard Blakeley]

I have to change nearly every single URL I put into Jira, it's driving me insane. 

[Max]

Another issue with this feature is that apparently after manually selecting "Display as URL" there're two objects: url link and url text.

And if I, say, copy this link and manually edit it then only url text is edited while the link itself stays the same. And that's a terrible behaviour.

To illustrate, I have "https://website.com" link, it displays inline. I change this to "display as URL" and manually edit it to, say, "https://chat.website.com". But it only changes url text, url link is still "https://website.com".

Anyway I think the best option here is to allow users to change default link behaviour in Settings,

[Kimmo]

Oh, I hadn't noticed this one. This is really bad as it makes it very easy for people to fall victim to phishing attacks. Yes, I know JIRA is supposed to be used by trusted users only but you can never be sure.

This needs to be fixed.

[Mikael Levoniemi]

bump! wtf is this? Why is this even a thing? URLS for default always please, ambiguity serves nobody.

[Leah]

That automatic "pretty link" feature (since March 2021) is the ONLY reason I'm here.  It is very annoying and not pretty at all.  Just confusing and a waste of time nobody has to blow.  Many, if not most people will find something else to use.

I'm sure there are several thousand irritated users who don't have time to search for or deal with this unwanted feature that would like to see the full URL rather than the so-called prettified option.

 Something that gives users a CHOICE  is better   

Do you want to keep your subscribers or not??

[Mark Stralka]

I received the JIRA "Software December Recap" newsletter email today. In the email was a link to this announcement, which includes the name of one of the JIRA Cloud Product Managers.

I politely messaged him on LinkedIn to try to get his attention to this frustrating "feature". 

If you're frustrated with this feature, you may want to try messaging him also.

[Brian Jackson]

Hey Mark, 
Yes, I've emailed many product managers. 

I even tagged the Atlassian CEO and he replied. So he is aware of this issue but doesn't seem to understand why it's a problem. 🤦 https://twitter.com/scottfarkas/status/1466134135563378690

I encourage everyone to also vote on this issue here: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-72429

I'm actually thinking about writing up a blog post about this. I have a few places where I have a decent reach/audience. I have huge respect for developers, and don't like taking things public. But this feature is by far one of the worst I've ever seen implemented. 

It's a tech software product and you can't even copy/paste URLs in and out of the software easily anymore. Just think about that for a second. 

[Thomas Gerard]

Please could you work on this, this is so time consuming.

[Marieke van Oostende]

This "feature" makes my life as ticket-creating PO much harder than it should be.

We have a very extensive application and providing links to specific locations is very important. Now we get "Log in" for every link. 

Please make this a configurable feature! 

[jaan]

Same. Extremely annoying and directly damaging to our workflows. Hard to understand why something like this was even shipped on a product for Development, where URLs are extremely important. 

[Adrian Esquivel]

This is the most annoying feature I've come across in all the apps I use. Can you please default to the FLL URL

[Lana White]

+5 from myself and my development team. This is extremely frustrating and should never have been introduced to non jira related links in the first place.

Please get this sorted ASAP!!!

[tan.khuu]

It's really annoying feature, I don't understand why there's no action to remove of change the default of it up until now

[Alain Pelletier]

+1 This very annoying feature is creating more issues than it solves. 

The "Display URL" adds http:// to UNC PATHS and scraps all the rest of the path after the domain. 

[Magnus]

This has annoyed me for quite some time now. Hopefully sorted soon.

[Josh Feinstein]

I have no idea who thought defaulting links o inline display was a good idea. It gets in my team's way every single day. We have a Dev, Test, and Live environments, not to mention temp environments and all 4 have the same <title> tag. Which link is being shared? It's impossible to tell without clicking 3 times to change it to display url.

I can't think of a single use-case for display inline. It helps no one.

Who could possibly want ambiguous links in software designed for engineering teams? 

FIX THIS PLEASE.

[Bas Mensink]

Incredible for a company like Atlassian to introduce this feature without the option to disable it. How hard can it be to make it optional? So many users being annoyed by this.

[Bill_P]

OK after having this up for nearly 8 months of continuous frustration, here is how to stop this Terrible feature on sites you control:

Setup your WAF on your servers to Block all traffic that contains:

User Agent contains Iframely

[Magnus]

Thanks, I will talk to my Ops guys.

[Brian Jackson]

Hey Bill, 
Appreciate you sharing this. However, it would be nice if you don't mark the answer as accepted yet. The reason is that many small businesses, remote workers, etc. struggle with this issue and don't have a WAF. 

We just don't want Atlassian thinking this issue is in any way resolved. Thanks!

[Mikael Levoniemi]

Indeed thanks bill, but don't destroy this ticket because the underlying issue is not resolved. Thanks!

[Bill_P]

It is a terrible work around, Not one I wanted to resort to.

It has very limited use, as you have to be able to block traffic by the Agent and haft the other product links I add I have no such control. 

But its better then nothing, and so far that's what I have been seen for action on this ticket.

[Alex Traber]

Hey, 

thanks Bill for the workaround. This is not possible to do on the cloud version, correct?

[Bill_P]

@Alex Traber  You have to block it on the end point so on your servers. We use Atlassian cloud but with a block on that user agent it no longer gives the useless links. 

[Issac Osis]

This "iframely" product is likely witness to many secret unreleased URLs now without any consent from Atlassian cloud users

[Mike Preisinger]

@Issac Osis ,

That's a very good point. 

Not to mention URLs shared among development teams, who are assuming some degree of privacy, could have access tokens or other sensitive information embedded in them.  (I know that's not best-practice, but we all know it happens sometimes.) 

The fact that these URLs are being sent to a third-party service to be resolved behind-the-scenes (assuming that's how it's implemented) is a potential security issue.  This is yet another reason this should be an optional feature that is defaulted to "off".  

[Martijn Verhoeven]

This is not the accepted answer. 

[Bill_P]

Agreed, this is a terrible answer, but its the only thing I have found to help since I not seen any movement on this ticket.

[Pieter Wyffels]

+1 . This is no solution at all, do not mark it as the accepted answer please.

[kmadsen]

Just go here guys - https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-72429 - vote and comment on this.

[Bastian Walger]

any update on this case? it is driving our team mad... 

[Rui Duan]

For whoever got annoyed with this feature, you can press Ctrl + Z or Cmd + Z (on MacOS) after the link has been masked to change it back to original link.

[Christoph Lechleitner]

Thanks for this hint!

Another approach that I plan to train my fingers to do is Ctrl-K Ctrl-V Tab Ctrl-V Enter.

This creates a link with the URL as link target and explicit link text and seems to be inserted without any automatism hitting lateron.

If the URL is not yet in the clipboard it's of course Ctrl-K www.... Ctrl-A Ctrl-C Tab Ctrl-V Enter

[David Sengmany]

My work around is if you paste the URL or group of URLs in and save it right away before it has a chance to even think about converting to a smart link, it will keep it in the URL format that you paste in. You have to be quick though! 

[Evan Cooper]

+1 - please let us set a default, 99% of the time I am setting these back to inline.