Anchor macros randomly break.
Asked by Eric Riddle:

Hi. We're in the process of inserting anchors within our documentation and we're finding that the anchors are randomly breaking and renamed.

For example, we create an achor called Requirements

Later, when testing, we find that links to that anchor have been renamed to Requi. We fixed it, and later we found it called Requ.

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Of course, any link within the document that links to #Requirements is now broken.

Any ideas?

Edit: Update with clarification:

The anchor names remain the same. It's the links that get renamed.

For example, I might have text that says "check the requirements section" and the link is to #requirements.

Later I check and the text is the same, but the link is now #requi and doesn't jump to the anchor.


Answers:
author: RPT Admin
body: It might be [this bug here](https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-65853?_ga=2.164396287.1350425791.1589276272-1623478036.1589276272). If it is, Atlassian has closed the bug without fixing it. Their advice is to migrate to the new editor.

I feel your pain.


author: Terence Kent
body: We've been seeing this since 2016 in Confluence Cloud and it's very annoying.

We will go to use pages with dozens of anchor macros and find that, as the OP described, the target for all the anchor macros have been renamed. In our case, however, the naming pattern change is consistent. It is always changed from #\<anchor_name\> to Page Title#\<anchor_name\> - which does not work.

If you look through the page history, there is no associated diff for these changes and they happen randomly, but about once a month. It's clearly something being done by Confluence in the background and I haven't found any information about how to stop it.


author: Matthew J. Horn
body: I guess one thing I would do to diagnose would be to look at the history of the page and diff the page with the previous to see when the change occurs. Not sure if this is going to lead to anything, but at least there's a chance that a pattern will emerge.


author: Eric Riddle
body: It's fairly random. Me (and my documentation team) just noticed it this morning. I haven't found a way to reliably reproduce it.

Our workflow right now is focused on adding links, anchors, and cross-referencing articles. So we're going through articles and adding this, then we check each others' work. We fixed links, but now we're finding links that we /know/ we fixed broken again.


author: Matthew J. Horn
body: Huh, I use a lot of local anchors and haven't seen this before. I can't think of why it might be happening. Can you reproduce this, or is it fairly random? I'd say if it's reproducible, you should file a bug. If not, hopefully, someone else can chime in and suggest what might be happening.


author: Matthew J. Horn
body: When you say it has been renamed, do you mean the actual \<a\> (anchor) tag within the page has been "renamed" or the text in the link to that anchor tag has been "renamed".


author: Eric Riddle
body: Matthew, I'm sorry I wasn't clear.

The anchor names remain the same. It's the links that get renamed.

For example, I might have text that says "check the requirements section" and the link is to #requirements.

Later I check and the text is the same, but the link is now #requi and doesn't jump to the anchor.


Tags: anchor

link