How do I disable automatic URL Formatting?
Asked by tgiokdi:

Any url put into trello card becomes unusable after about 3 seconds, if I'm comparing:

[http://example.com](http://example.com?)

and

<https://example.com>

both eventually become "Example.com - huge title with lots of words but nothing that indicates what the url was that was originally placed"

I have a lot of cards with a lot of urls on them, and it looks like all of them are currently doing this, which is breaking my workflow. I've searched for a couple hours through all the announcements, change logs, and account settings and don't see any discussion about the rollout of this change, nor how to not have the content of the cards changed without warning.


Answers:
author: tgiokdi
body: One additional work around is to omit the "http://" or "https://" portion of the url and it remains as an unformatted clickable url

comments: author: Johann E_
body: Thanks for this information! But to clarify this for all Trello community moderators and Trello developers:

1. This does cost time and can result in errors. It is bad usability.

2. How do people get to know your suggestion? Do you want to email every Trello user?

3. In technical topics you need to read the whole and correct URL. It is important to see if it is with or without "s".

4. Often the real URL is more helpful for everybody than the meta-title Trello shows. Because the Meta-Title is e.g. often the same or is too long.

For confluence there seems to be already a solution. So this feature is missing in Trello. <https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-questions/Avoid-formatting-of-links/qaq-p/1721168>


author: tgiokdi
body: Just a heads up, I never accepted an answer, so the "accepted answer" functionality of this forum can not be trusted.

comments: author: Johann E_
body: Thanks! I already was wondering how you could accept this answer :-)


author: Steve
body: Great.

It's about as reliable as any larger company website with self-reviews.


author: Tony Dawson
body: An easy workaround is to change the http to Http. The capital H stops Trello's regex from automatic URL formatting. The link still works.

comments: author: Johann E_
body: Thanks! It works :-) OMG


author: John Bevan
body: FYI: There's a request to allow this feature to be disabled here:

\* Jira Cloud: <https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-72429>

\* Confluence Cloud: <https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-72693>

If you login to those pages, then click the More dropdown in the top left, you can add your vote.


author: Lexxi
body: Not going to lie--this feature is horrible and not sure why Trello can't just put a toggle in to shut it off as this feature is newer. However, another workaround to see the link without it turning into a relabeled hyperlink is to "edit." I haven't tested this in every scenario, but I use this primarily in the activity of a card. If I re-open it in edit, it reshows everything exactly the way it was cut/pasted in. No need for backticks or other modifications to the url. Hope this helps.


author: Thomas Murphy
body: Does anyone want to collaborate on making an open source version of Trello? Atlassian seem intent on destroying it as a useful tool.

comments: author: Iain Dooley
body: [@Thomas Murphy](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/3903805) let's imagine (ambitiously) that 8 people working full time for one year could build a product that is actually as useful and stable and robust and as versatile as Trello is currently (don't forget it works on any device ... ).

Now let's assume it takes 3 seconds to surround every URL you put into Trello with backticks.

Ballpark maths suggest you would need to paste about 18,000,000 URLs before it would have been worth building an open source alternative.

Anyway there are already quite a few open source Kanban projects out there:

<https://wekan.github.io>

<https://kanboard.org>

<https://restya.com/board>


author: Thomas Murphy
body: Great links, thanks!

Your time estimate misses out on a few points:

1. I can't go and edit every instance of anyone else on any trello board my company has used over the past six years of someone adding a URL to a card to add additional formatting.

2. Given the large number of team members and clients also pasting URLs into cards, the time spent begging/pleading with people to add additional formatting is also not estimated.

3. It assumes the only problem Trello has ever had, or will ever have, is this one bug. I was more identifying a broader "death by features" pattern which is emerging.


author: Iain Dooley
body: [@Thomas Murphy](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/3903805) yeah the retroactive update and fixing stuff sent by clients does sound troublesome.

I don't think you can do a match/against in Butler the way you used to be able to with ButlerBot, but this BenkoBot listener adds backticks to URLs added to the description of a card:

<https://gist.github.com/iaindooley/0c8f97115016e8c0b8137944a1b4fda9>

You can add it as a listener in BenkoBot:

<https://app.benkobot.com/>

Although you'd need a "bot user" to run it as so it can ignore its own description changes.

You could run a similar function as a regex using the "adhoc" code to retroactively change past cards. Editing comments is a problem if the user who made the comments is a board admin, you can only edit comments when you're a greater level of access than the person who made them ... but you could set up similar listeners for comments and change them where possible, also for things like creating checklist items. BenkoBot runs Trellinator which is an open source framework I created, the docs are here:

<http://docs.trellinator.com>

I like the new URL formatting personally, but one of the things I also like about Trello is that the API allows me to make it work how I want most of the time.

I would also like to note for the record that I think Trello have done a great job of innovating in a competitive atmosphere with a very large and unprofitable legacy user base while staying true to the original vision of the product, no doubt under new commercial pressures following their acquisition by Atlassian. I really like the features they've been coming out with, I think they're very Trello-like.


author: Iain Dooley
body: [@tgiokdi](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/4397482) firstly, there is a way to do this, just prepend the line with four spaces and it won't apply any auto formatting.

<https://help.trello.com/article/821-using-markdown-in-trello>

However, you can also just right click a link to copy it, so what part of this is breaking your workflow?

comments: author: tgiokdi
body: four spaces is a lot more than just ctrl+v

actually *seeing* the urls is what i'm looking to do. right now I have card full of checklists of urls to verify or to paste into things, which is impossible with the urls being edited after I enter them in. It looks like it's all happening on stuff that's being entered in now and not on content that's already in there, so there's a flag that's being set somewhere that's telling the text editor to ping the url that's put in, then edit the text.

I'm at risk of lecturing here, if you need more details, please let me know. Your flair says "community leader" does that mean you work with Atlassian or are you just a volunteer on the message boards?


author: Michael Pryor
body: Use backticks before the url.


author: tgiokdi
body: [@Michael Pryor](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/1131556) thank you, but as I mentioned previously, that's additive to undo the formatting, it would be best if this was a toggle on the account level.

what's the purpose of this functionality? I see that it's happening on Jira as well and is breaking all sorts of things over there as well. Imagine that I'm sending you a comment and I say:

"I fixed the cat picture on example.com please confirm you see the cat in a firefighter hat now."

Previously (and with any links created before this change) it remains legible. with this change it becomes:

"I fixed the cat picture on Example.com \| Home of the Internet, cat pictures for every example you could think of! please confirm you see the cat in a firefighter hat now."


author: Thomas Murphy
body: Yes, this is a major bug for us. We use Trello as a web development documentation and task management tool, and it's broken a core function of how we use Trello. I would happily pay Trello more money if they would just stop adding features, or at least give people an option of turning them off.


author: Kevin Terrell
body: I prefer seeing the bare URLs as well. Using backtics or spaces turns the URL into a code block and the URL is not clickable then. I prefer a bare, clickable URL. I would love Trello to provide a way to disable the automatic formatting.


author: Grzegorz Nowak
body: Yes, please, disable auto formatting, this is a major downfall fro Trello.


author: Steven Mac Shelley
body: I also hate the new auto formatting. Please add an option to turn the formatting off.


author: Johann E_
body: [Iain Dooley](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/1416112) Your suggestion is no solution as the links are not clickable anymore.

Why is it so hard to understand that the real URLs are often important to see?


author: flouty
body: Any updates on this? This new feature is completely unnecessary and serves no purpose. Please remove it as default.


author: Caryl Bauwens
body: Yes, please add 'on/off' functionality. This has been super disruptive to our flow!


author: Sophie Janotta
body: I would also love to disable the automatic formatting of URLs. It is very disturbing.

Thanks, Sophie


author: Christine Hines
body: Whenever JIRA does formatting don't want, the only way I have found to stop it is to insert a code block and paste the text within that block.


author: John Bevan
body: A workaround could be to add a non URL character (i.e. something that would have to be encoded to be included in the URL) onto the end of the link; e.g. instead of typing \`<https://www.google.com>\` put \`<https://www.google.com>;\` - the trailing semi-colon preventing the automatic formatting from kicking in.

After you've pasted the text you can leave the semicolon if it's doing no harm; or can delete it without the URL auto-format from kicking in (and this deleting's generally simpler than removing auto-formatting).


author: Johan Perkins
body: CTRL+Shift+v for paste creates an unformatted link.

comments: author: Kevin Terrell
body: This doesn't work for me. The link still gets converted to a favicon and page title.


author: Glyn Spencer
body: Forced upgrades are such a pain. This one is annoying particularly because it significantly changes the look and feel. I don't want URLS entered to take the TITLE from the page of hte URLS it's not relevant.


author: s4nk
body: Here's another workaround I've found (I'm still testing it, at it may break other stuff, but so far I haven't noticed any issues) - edit /etc/hosts (if you are on Mac or Linux) by adding a line like this:

```
127.0.0.1 api-gateway.trello.com
```

It will block Trello app from making requests to api-gateway.trello.com which it uses to transform URLs. I don't know what other functionality makes use of that gateway, but it seems that basic actions like adding and editing cards don't, so the app is still usable. If it turns out that something actually breaks, the next step would be to configure an HTTP proxy and only block requests to [https://api-gateway.trello.com/gateway/api/object-resolver/\*](https://api-gateway.trello.com/gateway/api/object-resolver/*)


Tags: atl-gruland