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

[Jeff]

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.

[atoponce]

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

[Dahu83]

Incroyable ! Inadmissible ! Ce n'est pas sérieux et professionnel ! 

[espelicht]

Let's hope this is not true 😵‍💫

[Jan_Mantau]

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.

[Jeff]

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" 🤣

[windfield]

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

[Jordanbergeson]

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.

[ahalawat]

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!!

[Tanuka1990]

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.

[Insta360]

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!