Unable to add links/URLS to posts /URLs stripped out in comments

Ah so the censorship has now reached the forum as well lol: “Your post has been submitted. It will be published after a review by our moderators”. 

When I enter a URL in the photo description, it immediately disappears in the mobile app, but the URL is visible when viewing the photo description on the STRAVA WEB site.

This is, oh, so frustrating.

Sharing links is what makes the Internet useful and essential to building online communities. In particular, attracting attention to important causes.

I was recently diagnosed with a form of muscular dystrophy, and my Strava community is the ideal pool of potential donors for a cause that’s important to me. In my post, linked below, I have to resort to a confusing obfuscation to communicate the fundraiser.

https://strava.com/athletes/589151/posts/35148870

Even stranger, when I first paste the link, the post feature displays a link preview! A vestigial feature of when this was still working correctly?

​@Marya, you state in your post:

Recently our team has been dealing with a sustained campaign of inauthentic content posted to the platform and as a result we have taken certain necessary steps to safeguard the community. … Community safety is our highest priority, and we will take any action necessary to protect them.

Yet, here we are, on a community forum where links are freely and easily shared, and I doubt there’s much (if any) harm. Surely, Strava’s engineers possess the technical acumen to sort out threatening sites from legitimate content.

It’s clearly the lack of knowledge of the developers how to solve this.

Just removing anything with an url of even an emoticon in the description is very amateurish.

I used to post links to Spotify playlists for my friends to share. I can’t do this anymore. I’d already cancelled my subscription because the Suunto app does everything I paid Strava for, now I’m certain I made the right decision - I’ve been a subscriber for eight years. 

So we need to have a look at Suunto for the lost functionality of Strava. Will give it a try, thanks

Sigh. Half measures. So, Strava backtracked on sharing links, but only under a narrow set of circumstances. And if you try to save a post, the operation fails. Comically, they still generate a link preview. Ridiculous.

Still a very bad solution to a minor problem. Why do we all have to suffer because of a little spam. Clear the spam and resume as normal.

That comes way too late and the explanations given are ridiculuous. 

Thanks for this note. It’s the first useful explanation I found when trying to figure out why Strava was rejecting a club post in which I included a local news article link. And I’m the (only) club admin.

It still doesn't make any sense. It's a broken solution to a really simple to solve problem (spam).

FYI, the latest update on this issue from Strava can be found in this comment from 6 days ago:

• Upholding platform safety

Don’t expect any satisfying answers though.