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What happened with URLs? Looks like URLs are being automatically removed from posts, so it's being a little bit more complicated to share for example Strava Challenges from clubs with friends.

I can't view the links in some of my Club posts. It just says content unavailable. Even with a new post I make, I can't attach a link.

Is it because I just accepted the new privacy policy? 

I have been a member for over a year and a half, so I know it isn't that. 

Help would be appreciated. 


It seems to be a bug across all clubs, I can see the same - all the links even in older posts were truncated/stopped working... 

Edit to add: not just clubs - ALL links... 🤨 I checked my older activities where I posted YouTube video links (as the race organisers made a personalised video from the event for each participant). All broken 😞 


I shared a URL of a useful tool as a comment to a group, and it was removed. That's not useful 🙎


All of a sudden I am unable to add links to my posts. I stream my Zwift races on YouTube and have always be able to use Strava as a way to let me followers know when I'm racing. I been on this platform for years and am always interacting with fellow athletes. Link to my post https://www.strava.com/athletes/35894425/posts/32646115


Looks like it's a bug "Content Unavailable"  🙎


Hello!


Thanks for the posts. We are looking into this and will post any updates we get from our team about this. Thank you for your patience!


I really hope this bug can be corrected and all the removed information from past activities can be restored.

Not only links have been removed, but also stings like "2.2KM". This is ridiculous. 


Hey Scout,

I also encountered the same problem when I posted on my own Strava Club. It's the screenshot when I failed to post anything on the post section in the Insta360 Clubhouse. Please help and resolve it, thanks!

 


thanks for posting this, spend half the morning trying to figure out why my links weren't working anymore.


yeah even the links in your profile description appears to be broken 😕😕


If the URL stripping from user content is a spam prevention measure, it's been poorly implemented and needs to be rolled back to reinstate user's content at a minimum. Many of us use URLs in descriptions for perfectly reasonable purposes and as mentioned earlier, data like distances that barely resemble URLs have also been stripped (hopefully non-destructively). Poor form Strava. 👎


So it’s clear now that Strava has edited any post, comment, title with a period in it without spaces on both sides of the period. 

support is now responding to people saying this is intentional. 

This is WILDLY poor development practice. Cant even handle basic regex to identify actual working URL??

At first I thought it was a mistake. Someone puts a domain suffix inadvertently and creates a “URL” like seattlerides.cc to indicate it was a cycling club ride. Ok. .cc is a domain suffix, I get it.

But removing distances that contain a “.”? 26.2 isn’t a URL.

It’s like they let a freshman computer science intern implement this regex. “Any time a dot appears without a space on both sides, kill it. It MUST be a suspicious link!” Is truly insane.

They could get more nuanced and only look for valid suffixes, and/or take it even further and only ban links to truly suspicious sites or domains.

If all links are banned from Strava forever I am moving everything to ridewithGPS, forever.

This is insanity.


It's not just the URLs. Today, I did a 4.5km run and updated my strava run title/description as '4.5km easy run'. And they removed the word '4.5km' completely and just showed 'easy run'. No matter what, the number would just not show up. So, I gave a space and wrote it as '4.5 km'. And then, it showed up. They need to fix there parameters lol if they're trying to get rid of links. Coz right now, it's removing all dot(.) related things.


i can see why they don't want random spammers to post urls, but for us developers that have 'approved' applications, why can't we put our own url's in?  doesn't 'approving' the application mean that strava has verified us and then we can be exempt.   

eh, but if it's removing anything after a period even in numbers, it's just poorly thought out anyhow


Support is claiming that it's for safety. Here's their response to my support ticket asking why this is happening:

Transcription:

Hi Aaron

Thank you for reaching out regarding the inability to post links on Strava.

At Strava, we are firmly committed to athlete safety, reviewing and improving our systems to uphold the utmost standard of safety and security for all our athletes. We also take our compliance with legal requirements very seriously. To this end, we have implemented mechanisms to detect and prevent suspicious or unsafe activity on Strava.

Due to the aforementioned safety measures we have in place, and in accordance with our policies, we are unable to lift the restriction at this time.

Kind Regards,
Alex M.
Strava Trust & Safety Team


I am not talking (also) for URL outside Strava... I am complaining about Strava Challenges URLs...

Come on... "Strava URL is not safe to Strava User" 🤣


Let's hope this was only an uninformed support clerk who didn't know anything about the ongoing investigation about not diplaying anything with a dot in it.


I don't have any URL in my post but just the number of the run in title...which has been removed from most of the post...Do we have any solution for this please ? updating the record of all runs manually will be vary challenging!!


In discussions as soon as I copy or share a link in a strava discussion, a blank space replaces the link! 


TRANSLATION:  In discussions as soon as I copy or share a link in a strava discussion, a blank space replaces the link!


Let's hope this is not true 😵‍💫


I am pretty sure they did it because people where linking a lot of routes created on other platforms like komoot. Those people are unlikely to require a Strava subscription and could make their followers reconsidering their own subscription.... So rhey are essentially directly blocking competition. And they doing it in such a crappy way that they are pissing everyone else too. If I can no longer post links on Strava in the future I WILL cancel my subscription. Then I have some money left to spend on veloviewer and intervals(dot)icu.


I admin a large membership Strava club with many events and challenges, often concurrently. I can no longer link to them from my Strava account due to this loss of functionality. 

I request that Strava reconsider this unfortunate decision. 

 

This a 


Je pense que c'est transitoire, actuellement on ne peut pas partager entre 2 personnes strava.


Incroyable ! Inadmissible ! Ce n'est pas sĂ©rieux et professionnel ! 


Mismo problema, coordino un grupo de corredores y en las actividades del club comparto el link con el punto de encuentro ya que la seccion de strava no funciona y ahora no hay una opcion que te mande directo al navegador (maps o waze) para llegar al punto de inicio.

Same problem, I coordinate a group of runners, in the club activities I share the link with the meeting point, the official section of Strava is not functional and now there is no option that sends you directly to Maps or Waze to get to the starting point.


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