Stop Trello from replacing a URL in a card comment into a page title

[Celeste]

Adding another voice to this discussion. This feature is very disruptive for a web development or marketing workflow. Our team regularly needs to copy URLs between platforms. With URL unfurling we need to open the page in a new browser window and copy the link from the URL field. Leaving off https doesn't help us when copying and pasting links. Some team members need to be able to link to the page, so adding the tick marks to remove the link also does not help us. The old method of displaying the URL with a link covered all bases and is the standard way most apps display links. Why remove it?

[mgerasimchuk]

Also faced this problem. For me, very important to have raw links in some cards

[Sven]

Hello, 

Please turn this function off. It really is annoying for our workflow of our company. We want it like it was in the past. We already made several costly mistakes because of this feature. Can you just rollback so it is like the old way it was? 

[Romain P_]

Hello there,

I really, really was hoping that the liveliness of this thread and of all related, for a business the size of Atlassian, would trigger a community manager to at least answer on why there was such a choice.

But this deafening silence just points that this "Community" is just a sterile echo chamber, where lively conversations happens, but no one is there to take action.

I have been a happy user of Trello throughout the years, but working in SEO right now it simply is not usable this way with collaborators, nor clients.

I have checked on Airtable — which also have their share of customer rant, but at least they do answer there —, Asana and will migrate my boards to an alternative option.

[joeytwiddle]

+1 for this. Why no response from the devs?

BTW on Discord users can prevent a thumbnail from being shown by wrapping the URL in angular brackets like this: `<https://url.here/>`

Although this issue is about the page title, not a thumbnail, still Trello could consider that approach.

[Emily Zaehring]

Because Trello keeps automatically opening my links, I'm being labeled a spam-bot by a number of websites. Sometimes this means going through a lengthy captcha and sometimes it means I'm not allowed to access the site for some time. I can go back and edit all my links but I worry that I will be deemed a malicious actor.

[elseapps]

The only effective workaround I have is to remove the protocol from the start of each link after pasting it in. https://www.mysite.com becomes mysite.com and is still clickable, but it appears to prevent Trello traversing the link.

On our framework we have a number of contexts in which links contain tokens for one-time use, and when testing functionality around that we've had to move the process off Trello and use email, because [a] people forget to strip off the protocols, then [b] Trello traverses the link and [c] when we run the next test step the link is no longer valid.

Dear Atlassian, perhaps you could make this new link curation an opt-out feature in your paid accounts?

[Patrick]

This is really very, very bad. Please fix the behaviour immediately or build in a display option. We work mainly with URLs because we are active in the field of search engine optimisation and therefore need to see the protocol, the subdomain, the directories and the file extensions directly. At the moment, efficient work with Trello is not possible. If the behaviour is not corrected in the short term, we will be forced to use another tool.

[Patrick]

By the way, the same applies to Confluence, of course. All our documentations for URL patterns etc. are useless because we don't see the URLs but only the titles.

Whoever came up with the idea for this feature obviously has no idea how and by whom your products are actually used.

[Ed Reckers]

Here's another example of the "unfurling" of URLs just destroying our day to day productivity. This is an example of using checklists to track URLs.

If it's not obvious, basicaly, this is a project to cleanup a number of copy/versioned URLs. These are all essentially the same URL appended with some version, ie `-copy`, `-copy-2`, `-2`, etc..

Oddly, some of the URLs here did not unfurl, and as you can see, the URLs that did not unfurl are actually usable. The intention is to track by URL, which is readable and understandable in context. The unfurled URLs require extra steps to view by everyone involved in the project.



I'm trying not to be overly repetitive here (I think this is my third post/example), but it's just another real-world example of where companies such as ours deal in URLs and not page titles.

The unfurling of URLs in this instance just made my day a little bit harder.

[circularcube]

Trello is owned by Atlassian, and I also use JIRA which is one of their products. They have the same feature there for displaying URLs in the card format - but on JIRA you can click on the link and it gives you a dropdown menu (see screenshot below) to select either URL, inline or card - so we just need that option ported over to Trello!

[Amaya Rodrigo]

So we are not all crazy, it's a sensible option for users to have? Who knew? ;)

[Matt Summers]

Please turn this feature off, for all the reasons mentioned above.

It's a pain point that I have to deal with every single day I work with Trello.

Make this an option or disable it. It's a feature no one asked for.

[razorfrog]

+1 this is terrible and needs an option to revert. Related posts: 

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Trello-discussions/Anyone-else-dislikes-how-trello-links-look-like-now-after-an/td-p/1686877

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Trello-discussions/Text-previews-for-links-are-ruining-my-workflow/td-p/1687815

[devnll]

I too would like to be able to turn this off, please. Thanks!

[Ian Peter Semey]

This is also something I also would like to be able to turn off changing URLs to the page titles.

There is a way around sometimes: If you are able to edit the text where the URLs are, then you get them without being converted to the page titles. But of course this only goes for the comments you have done, or if you are admin.

[Danielle Chen]

Hi Jamie! I am sorry for bringing any inconvenience to you. Can you let us know more about why you want to see the full URL? This can help us improve the feature better. 

[sergetankevich]

Hi! have the same problem. I have the same problem. Extremely inconvenient. I will add links to pages for a colleague to the checklist. Now it is extremely inconvenient to navigate. https://prnt.sc/12l31oo
Is it possible to turn it off?

[Jamie Stevens]

I need to see the full URLs as myself and my colleagues regularly collaborate on lists of pages that might need specific changes and it is a lot easier if we can see the URL for each one rather than having to click the link to get the URL. If Trello is being used for any kind of web development and digital marketing, seeing the URL is very important. For example, I may want a page moved from example.com/oldcategory/page to example.com/newcategory/page and it makes the process much more streamlined if everyone can see the URLs rather than the title of the page. It doesn't need to be default, but an option to turn it off would be great as it worked much better before.

[Dale Trexel]

Please add me to the list of people who are super annoyed about this new Trello behavior. As a web developer, the URLs I post in cards are themselves the most important thing to communicate, NOT the titles of the pages that the URL points to. The new behavior is especially problematic when pointing to the same content on different development copies of a website: they have different URLs, but the same page title, so Trello displays them the same. Now (especially on cards created before this change) all those different links require you to hover or click on them to figure out which is which.

One should not have to go through extra hoops when copying and pasting a URL to ensure that it communicates the right information. If anything, it should require extra markdown to convert a URL to the current display and not the other way around.

[Edit to 2021 post in 2024] Woohoo! Atlassian now gives me a badge for a complaint that continues to spam my inbox with me-too notices! It's the only interaction I've ever had on this platform!

[Steffen Grützki]

We are extremely annoyed by these new behaviour, too. We need to communicate links in our team. On top of that at some points of the process the crucial information is WITHIN the link (like example.com/event/XYZ/overview.html, where you need to see "XYZ").

The new trello behaviour therefore is very inconvenient for us.

Please give us an option to turn it off generally, without adding markup to each line or other extra steps. We want to just copy and paste and have the links visible.

[Liz]

@Danielle Chen I've recently posted about this, too https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Trello-questions/Smart-links-not-so-smart/qaq-p/1691105

It can't process private links well, making them meaningless. At least with the full URL we can see some of the context

[Flavio]

We work on web and we need to read urls exactly as they are, right now this thing makes Trello unusable for us. 

[Monica Snyder]

Yep, I agree with all of this. Please make it optional. Thanks!

[Nathan]

Absolutely agree with either rolling this feature back, or making it optional on a per-board basis. 

As a web developer it makes sharing links with clients difficult, especially when the URL itself is important.

Here are a few use cases causing me issues:

1.  Links to the same page on different environments can't be easily identified. E.g., If both https://example.com/ and https://stage.example.com/ have the same page title then it's impossible to tell which link goes to which environment.

2. Links containing query parameters or hashes can't be easily identified. E.g., https://example.com/, https://example.com/#test, and https://example.com/?test=1 all look identical.

Surely there are additional use cases where this feature may cause issues, but these are the two that have affected me the most so far.

Thanks for considering this feedback.

[Leah]

Remove the https: or just use // to make the links render in clickable text like they used to.

[Jordie Bodlay]

A lot of people have a lot of different use cases, you can't just make a permanent change like this. You'd think Atlassian would have known there'd be a lot of use cases where users want to see the URL. Especially when a lot of those use cases include developers. This feature should have been launched with an option to turn it off.

The solution should not be to ask users of your product to go and edit hundreds to thousands of cards, but should be to rollback or roll forward with a feature toggle per account and/or board.

[RahulD]

This is a perfect example of why we don't like it :

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Trello-questions/Stop-Trello-from-replacing-a-URL-in-a-card-comment-into-a-page/qaq-p/1686289#M49181

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Trello-questions/Stop-Trello-from-replacing-a-URL-in-a-card-comment-into-a-page/qaq-p/1686289#M46629

[Rocco Neil April]

@Danielle Chen Adding my name to this list. It's rendered Trello very very hard to use as none of our internal links have page titles. Please turn this off ASAP!! Also read this whole thread!

[rbrollins]

@Danielle Chen Add me to the extremely long list of people who are infuriated by the inability to turn this nonsense off.

And here's an additional reason that this is highly undesirable:

Every time I view a card that has a dozen links to my several dozen different dev/test/prod web servers, Trello performs TWO dozen requests against my servers (one for the link and one for the favicon. It doesn't cache favicons across requests). This is wasting MY server's resources to implement a feature I DON'T WANT.

[Rocco Neil April]

And messing with the analytics.

[mendhak]

Many examples given here apply to many of us.  I have another one to add.  Some sites don't return the correct title, and the link 'preview' turns out to be completely misleading.  For example try this in a Trello card:

https://www.patchplants.com/gb/en/plants/bay-tree-609/

And see what you get.  I'm getting "variegated fatsia japonica".  It's a page about bay tree.  The site isn't returning the correct response to your bot.  And I shouldn't have to chase them down.  So to help with my job I'd like to be able to see the full URL. 

> Can you let us know more about why you want to see the full URL?

Can you let us know more about why you don't want us to see the full URL? We haven't asked for this 'feature'. 

I'm guessing you're doing this to be consistent with the Confluence/Jira changes which show a link preview... but the difference is, those products do allow users to show the URL as a full URL!

Can you let us know more about why you don't want to give us an option?

[Sharon Eaton]

Awful feature - so very inconvenient.

I noticed that if you click on edit, you can copy the content of the card with the real url.

Not a great workaround but I guess it will have to do!

Grrrrr

[Ryan O_Connor]

Wait, Trello added this functionality as a new "feature"? LOL. I've only been using Trello for 6 months or so, so I would be even more furious if I was more ingrained into their system when then they haphazardly decided to roll this abomination out (after having it work the way it should prior, jeez).

I've just been dealing with the URL issue, but ended up Googling it because I was baffled there was no settings option to show the plain text URL and not have it inherit the title tag in its place (seriously, wtf?!). 

Anyway, just another voice here to make it clear how difficult this can make workflow for web devs, seo, anyone dealing with a lot of URLs in our day to day workflow, which I would suspect is a large-ish portion of what Trello users are using the platform for in the first place? Isn't this thing literally supposed to be designed to make our project management easier?

I've been using the free version for the last few months to test it out as I desperately needed to get away from huge email threads to manage projects, but man, sorry to say, I was hoping this tool would sell me on a premium version that I could embed into my workflow, but I don't even like the free version enough to want to keep using it, 90% of which is a result of workflow interruption due to the unfurling URL issue.

Such a bummer because Trello gets so many other things right, but this seems like a classic example of a company doing no UX / UI testing, and definitely not listening to serious criticism from the users, many of which are not using a free version.

[elseapps]

I concur wholeheartedly.

I've just sold my dev business, and I expect my Trello days will soon be over (I'm committed to working out the year). But if I were continuing, I would have to migrate to a service that doesn't gratuitously add pain points just because ... what? ... they think the restyled URLs look nice?

[seomartin]

unfortunately I gave up after waiting for so long, I migrated to CLICKUP and I'm enjoying it. ON clickup you can decide how you paste links ctrl+v insert link with title, ctrl+shift+v paste simple and plain urls.

[Eric Feitel]

Thx for the recommendation !

[G.Ford]

Just started using Trello over the past year with a web developer and I have to agree, this feature is so annoying and I can't understand why Atlassian has not done anything about it considering the number of people on this thread (and as mentioned in other threads) talking and complaining about the same thing and still nothing!!

I am no expert in web development but surely it would be a simple fix to add an option to be able to turn it off or on wouldn't be hard to do.

Anyway, I have also logged a ticket with Atlassian about this. Maybe if everyone does and keeps logging the issue every couple of weeks/months until something is done.

[elseapps]

There now appears to be an extra level of f**kery.

Previously, anything I added to a card within <code> tags (two backticks fore and aft, or an indent >= 4 spaces) was left alone by this URL transformation idiocy. Now, links within those blocks are being "interpreted" for me, so I have to add anything I need retained accurately as an attachment to the card. It's an extra step I've not had to worry about previously and is really straining my patience.

Unfortunately, some of my clients are "owners" of the multiple Trello boards they use for multiple vendors. But I'm now keen to move on for those I can take with me.

Atlassian: provide a subscription tier that will let me defeat this URL transformation for external links, and I will pay up and stay. Otherwise I'll have to migrate. What was a great product has become too risky to use, and all because of your boneheaded insistence on traversing and transforming external URLs despite the extensive push-back from your users. Loyalty only goes so far.

[Nick Burt]

This is more of a workaround instead of a real solution. But Trello doesn't use the title when the "https://" is left off the URL.

If you would like the full URL to show on the comment, you can use markdown syntax:

[https://trello.com/](trello.com/)

[Renee Dubuc]

I am also very annoyed by this URL unfurling feature! I too am a web dev who needs to see the exact path of URLs. I'm not sure why it has stopped unfurling URLs on some of my boards, but not others.

Either way, I figured out a partial workaround. Add 1 backtick before and after your URL to visually preserve the full path. However, it's no longer clickable. So you'd have to copy the whole link instead of just clicking.

Example:

`google.com`

This is just a stopgap solution. Trello really needs to make this an optional feature.

[circularcube]

As a workaround you can add a backtick either side of the URL and it will turn into code display - eg

`https://community.atlassian.com`

[Romain P_]

It does not work. And is not practical to change all my cards to this.

[Nick Jones]

Horrendous, useless "feature" — this shouldn't even be an option in settings, this should just be completely gone. Totally useless productivity killer, this does not seem like something your core users would want.

[Brandon Cardone]

Hello, 

Is there any new updates to this? Are Trello devs even working on a toggle for this? 

It's great that someone developed a plugin for a specific browser to help, but what about those of us that use the phone and desktop apps? 

Is there a support ticket open somewhere for this? With as many people up in arms over this you think it would have been resolved by now?

I love Trello and am forever a loyal user, but this feature was not thought through well and needs to be rolled back or provide a way to turn it off. If someone can build out a plugin, there should be no reason why it can't be baked into Trello.

[elseapps]

I am beginning to wonder whether the primary aim of the change is data collection. Traversing every posted link gives Trello quite a cache of business-related information. Given how averse the Trello team is to providing a solution for what is now a widespread pain point, I can't believe "our UX expert is right and all our users are wrong" is a sufficient reason.

[Romain P_]

I don't understand why a tool adapted to techs would force this feature - it's ok from a consumer perspective, but from a scrum master, product manager, and anyone who would use it professionnally, it's really a mess.

I was trying to advocate Trello as a main tool for our company, but this is clearly putting all devs & project leads off, as a unnecessary step, hindering the clarity of written text containing URLs.

@Morgan Wang , is this feature (making URLs unfurling deactivable) added to the Trello roadmap ?