Link Previews appearing in trello

[Dev Team]

Hi,
I have been facing issues with the third party links in trello. The links are resolving and when do copy-paste they do not get formatted properly. Any idea how to fix or disable link previews?

[Rebecca Powell · Accepted solution]

Not sure if this will help anyone in 2024 but I used the Link Preferences settings page and chose

-URL: Display the full URL ‘www.example.com’   

It still created a link but not those VERY FRUSTRATING blocks.  Just looks like a regular link.

https://id.atlassian.com/manage-profile/link-preferences

Cheers!

[Sophie]

Hi! 

I don't think they're talking about Link Cards, just links added into the description or comments in a regular card. 

I personally don't like this "preview" and would prefer to see the link itself (http://...), as it was before. Is there any way to disable the link preview?

Thanks! :)

Sophie

[Felix]

Hey @Sophie 

currently, no. There's no way to disable the link previews.

Felix

[Sophie]

Thanks Felix! 

I'd very much like to be able to... if there's any way... someday. ;) 

Sophie

[Dan Ivory]

Not 100% sure if I understand the question perfectly here but I think you are struggling with the new Link Cards? 

https://help.trello.com/article/1256-link-cards

I made an overview video of these here (for Google Docs/Sheets) if that helps explain them...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNIzISDlD1s

I also noticed recently that the Link Card functionality doesn't work for me when I have a Butler automation set up to automatically add things to a card when created. eg I have an automation to add a certain label to a new card. This seems to block the Link Card functionality from working (removing the preview functionality, so it pastes in as a normal link instead). Maybe that will help you. So if you don't want the Link Cards to happen then make a basic Butler automation like I mentioned (let me know if you need help with that). 

------

You can also manually convert Link Cards back into regular cards...

Convert a Link card to a regular card

Link cards are placeholders that let you preview content from another website directly within your board. If you want to use a standard Trello card instead, you can definitely do that!

1. Right-click the Link card to show the quick menu
2. Click Convert to Regular Card

(mentioned in here https://help.trello.com/article/1256-link-cards)

Hope that helps!

Dan

[Felix]

Do you have an example of what "not formatted properly" looks like?

Depending on where you are seeing the links resolved, you may be able to disable it. For example, link cards can be converted to regular cards (with no link resolution), but it can't be disabled for attachments.

[Dev Team]

Hi,
I think my issue is not with link cards. The issue is with the notes added in the card that have screenshot links. Please check the example below.

Screenshot : 

[Felix]

Hey,

sorry I missed this - there's no way to disable this feature.

You can work around it by wrapping the url in backticks (`) to make it a code element, if you need to be able to see the full URL.

[Dev Team]

Thanks for the response. I will follow with the backticks for now

[jumarko]

Yeah, any 3rd party links for authenticated websites are basically useless and a problem since they don't show up properly.

So for example when using Slab (wiki) we get this: 

And wrapping it with backticks isn't great because then it doesn't work as a link (that is you cannot click it) :(.

[hanisko]

I have the same experience as jumarko and it is frustrating that Trello is going out of its way to actively break my content. I use Trello to track web development projects and regularly want to provide links to specific places in the (password protected) app. Every meaningful distinct link I type in gets converted to the same meaningless block.

It would be great if we could opt-out of this behavior in Board settings.

Having markdown that to opt-out link by link, would also work. Losing clickability, makes backticks a poor solution. I think it's crazy that even if you use the painful [http://my.link](http://my.link) syntax you still get hijacked by the preview.

---

In a broader sense, this feature just seems like bad software design. It presupposes that your app understands the content's meaning. When you style a link as a preview (put in a box with an image and a shadow) you are giving this content exponential importance over its sibling content. In many cases this is a bad assumption. Trello is not the only software to implement this widget, and it frustrates me wherever I find it. 

[Bob Hernon]

You're absolutely right. Atlassian accels at breaking customer data by taking solid abstractions Fog Creek invented and replacing them with cheap modern eye candy for the uninformed. 

The new wysiwyg editor is classic example, and the comment links automatically creating a massive waste of real estate with link preview images.

I saw this coming when Trello was sold to Atlassian.  I'm racking my brain furiously trying to figure out how to preserve years of solid content history before everything in our archives gets destroyed by the Borg at Atlassian.

Reminds me of Joel Spoksky's story of the early days at Excel when the product team adopted the mantra: identify your dependencies and eliminate them.

That engineering concept is becoming even more critical as more companies like Atlassian adopt the nanny state abstraction and presume they know better than their own customers what's good for them.

I wish someone in charge there would change the culture to adopt Spoksky's other engineering standard that made Trello so good in the first place: "instead of doing it the easy way, we did it the cool way"

Since markdown has been replaced with real code for all these tricks, it's pure laziness they don't provide an efficient solution to control behavior for the welfare of the user instead of optimizing for the VP's quarterly bonus. You can do anything in software, you just have to care about what your implementing.

Not that I expect anyone inside the company to listen or change their behavior, but at least I finally got it off my chest as I start thinking critically about preserving my welfare by extricating our assets from Trello or anything else Atlassian owns.