Looks like a heavy handed quick fix , all my just giving links were removed from charity rides. Apparently it's only temporary, but will they put them back later or are they permanently deleted? It's annoying as my post was viewed by a few hundred people , but had no link for donations and the moments gone. Pissed off.
Maybe there really was an emergency where the current quick and very unprofessional implemented sanction was better than doing nothing. But @tlem is right, the 4 days too late communication of this is unacceptable and closing the related threads for further comments is questionable too.
I hope they bring links back. Posting the song of the ride is the reason why I bother to write a post at all! Don't call yourself social media, make me pay for it, and then not allow anyone to share any links. Boo!!
Between the inaction regarding the clutter in the feed for ages, and now this censorship, I just cancelled my premium features after 11 years.
Good for you. What they've done here—both in preventing links from being posted, and worse, in modifying user-contributed personal content—are serious breaches of trust. Their response to this has been insufficient, off the cuff, and frankly rings of adolescence. I get so much value from Strava that I will have a hard time cancelling my Pro subscription but I am very seriously considering it. It's not just these actions, but what it shows more deeply about how they view their customer base.
I just can't get over how inappropriate, rash, and incompetent it was of them to to edit people's past content, including that of all paying customers. Outrageous.
Their official response (https://communityhub.strava.com/t5/strava-features-chat/upholding-platform-safety/m-p/45352/thread-id/8013) suggests they don't really care and have no plans to revert this. Just deep, deep incompetence and unprofessionalism.
For what it's worth, I checked my activities through the Strava API & it seems like the underlying data models are also missing the URL data. In other words as it stands right now there is no known way of recovering all the URL data they mass deleted.
+1 to sentiments already shared in this thread, this is a HUGE breach of trust with users that have used Strava as a repository for saving data related to activities, that can sensibly include URLs. Years of activities with links to YouTube videos, race results, marathon plan google sheets, etc have been deleted for me & I seem to have no way to even get this data back for my own personal backup. 👎
Seems like they are having other issues too. Broken links shared on their community thread
#brinkbacklinks
As a web developer, I find it hard to understand what is this emergency that justifies the actions and then no communication what was the issue.
Some spam urls? Not a big thing? Some XSS issue? That would a big thing, but how normal urls would be related to it.
Well as everyone here agrees, this is an incredibly stupid thing even by strava standards.
But I have at least found a way to answer the biggest question, of whether they actually deleted all the links from the underlying database or not.
And the answer seems to be: Apparently Not (good!)
They are apparently just filtering with an overly-simple regex (that simply drops any characters separated by a period, not necessarily even a link!) while serving text through any public channel.
I base this conclusion on downloading my complete “archive” of data, as requested and eventually downloaded as a large ZIP file, via the following process:
- go to: Settings / My Account / Download or Delete Your Account
- in the section “Download Request (optional)" click cRequest Your Archive]
- wait an hour or two for an email then download your ZIP file
- examine the files therein (such as activities.csv, comments.csv, etc) and observe intact links
Strava really needs to fix this pathetic quick-fix hack ASAP, but I am now at least reassured that my data has not been scrubbed forever. And I now have a local copy of everything, just in case, and suggest everyone here do the same.
BTW, they now provide a much more complete collection of data than the last time I tried using this feature. It actually now seems to be a very complete dump of every single thing I’ve ever done with strava -- including GPS data, descriptions, comments, images, videos, even kudos -- and is formatted in a way that’s actually quite usable if you know even a little bit about spreadsheets and databases.
Hope this helps.
@FoldsInHalf thanks for digging into that, fingers crossed that they fix it sometime soon! I've had a plenty of workout videos linked to my activities, also some race videos, all gone now... I very much hope to get them back 
I hope this thread bump is as annoying as masking all my awesome links :)
I lost a lot of extra activity related data in the description and activity name fields because I separated them with dots, and I often put dots the end of abbreviations too. The silly Strava algorithm thought they were links and deleted them. Strava should have moved the deleted stuff to private notes…
Bumping this topic because this really needs to be addressed. There are so many community oriented reasons for sharing links (signups, charity, etc.) on Strava and we’re essentially derailed to “Find our IG page and click the link there” or “Google this website”.
Why was this applied universally to all data across Strava? A simple filter based on some combined metric of account age/usage/premium status would have been more than enough to weed out the spam accounts.
Strava doesn't just remove URLs. For example, if you manually add the text "VO₂ max=58 ml/kg.min" to your activity description, the next time you edit the description, the text will change to "VO₂ max=58 ml/". If you add the same text using the API, the change is immediate.
But I have at least found a way to answer the biggest question, of whether they actually deleted all the links from the underlying database or not.
And the answer seems to be: Apparently Not (good!)
They are apparently just filtering with an overly-simple regex (that simply drops any characters separated by a period, not necessarily even a link!) while serving text through any public channel.
I base this conclusion on downloading my complete “archive” of data, as requested and eventually downloaded as a large ZIP file, via the following process:
- go to: Settings / My Account / Download or Delete Your Account
- in the section “Download Request (optional)" click cRequest Your Archive]
- wait an hour or two for an email then download your ZIP file
- examine the files therein (such as activities.csv, comments.csv, etc) and observe intact links
Strava really needs to fix this pathetic quick-fix hack ASAP, but I am now at least reassured that my data has not been scrubbed forever. And I now have a local copy of everything, just in case, and suggest everyone here do the same.
I did this, and links pointing to other activities on strava are available, but all other links (links to my official race results) have been removed from activities.csv. Also, on strava.com, external links posted to private notes seem to be retained, and all links to the strava website seem to retained everywhere. This looks more like a database deletion of links (except those in private notes and those that point to strava.com) than a simple quick fix hack.
I'm sorry but the "solution" that was posted in the other thread about this issue is not a solution. A solution would be something that brings our activities, posts, comments, etc to the exact same state they were before you removed the URLs.
You didn't even answer the big open questions we have regarding what happened. I would like Strava to urgently answer the following questions:
(1) Are you filtering URLs merely in the user interface and in the API – or have you actually modified the content stored in your database?
(2) If it is the latter case, how are we going to recover our data? What kind of backups do you have? Are you going to restore all the URLs and other removed content from the backups once this "ongoing situation" is over? Can we at least download an intact version of our data for our own use?
(3) Why there was zero communication about what is going to happen beforehand? It's clear now that you removed the URLs on purpose. The removal wouldn't have been okay even if you gave us an advance warning, but at least it would have made the situation a little bit more bearable.
I could maybe understand if you temporarily disabled adding NEW links to NEW activities, but instead, you retroactively removed all the links from old activities. This has nothing to do with safety and is totally unacceptable.
This is STILL an issue, with NO answer from anybody. This is frustrating for sure
