Hey all!

Thank you again for your patience and your contribution.

Today is the day. We’re happy to share that our solution has just been released to all Jira and Confluence users!

You are now able to

• keep smart links as your default view, but add exceptions for the domains you want to insert as simple URLs instead (for example your dev/stage environments or third party tools you use that you’d rather see the URL for)

• turn smart links off by default, but add exceptions for the domains you want to keep them for (for example Jira, Confluence, Google Drive or Figma)

This is where your settings live → https://id.atlassian.com/manage-profile/link-preferences. You can also access the settings page by clicking your avatar at the top right of your product, clicking ‘Manage account’ and then heading to the ‘Link preferences’ tab. If you need more help, feel free to check out our step-by-step guide.

While we are confident that this will satisfy the needs of most users, we do acknowledge that there is a need for a site-wide, admin-controlled setting as well. For everyone interested in that feature, please follow this new ticket: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-79892 

And last but not least, to all our loyal Trello users: while we haven’t finished the required work just yet, these settings will also work for your connected Trello accounts soon.

Thank you again for participating.

Andre | Product Manager, Linking Platform

 

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Hey everyone!

Thank you all for your continuous feedback and your patience!

We’re happy to share that we’ve made great progress on the proposed solution and feel confident to share some details of the feature and when you can expect it to be released.

How will the feature work?

• Users will be able to set their preferred view for all links to either URL, Inline, Card or Embed Smart Link view, with Inline being the default setting

• Additionally users will be able to set their preferred views for specific domains/URLs
  • Example 1: you could choose URL view for a specific domain you don’t want to insert as smart links, but keep smart links on for all other URLs
  • Example 2: you could keep Smart Links for your Jira and Confluence links, default your Giphy and Youtube links to Embed, and default all other links to URL

• When you set preferred views for specific domains/URLs, we can’t guarantee that your preferred view is always possible. While the ‘URL’ view will always be possible for links that match your exception, ‘Inline, ‘Card’ and ‘Embed’ will depend on whether or not we currently support the preferred view for that domain.

• The feature will be found in a central place at https://id.atlassian.com/manage-profile/, affecting Smart Links in Jira, Confluence and Trello
  • Example 1: Your preferences will work for the Jira Description field, Confluence Pages and Trello Description field, because they all uses Smart Links
  • Example 2: Your preferences won’t work for the ‘Linked Issues’ feature on the Jira Issue View, because it’s not a Smart Link

When will the feature be released?

• You can expect this to be shipped to all users during the month of October

Want to contribute?

• We’ve already got a prototype that we’re testing with users. If you want to get an early look at what’s coming and have the chance to provide feedback directly, please book in with us via https://calendly.com/mbytnerowicz/smart-link-default-view

Have a good day everyone,

Andre | Product Manager, Linking Platform

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Atlassian update - 02 May 2022

Hey everyone!

Thank you all for your valuable feedback, and special thanks to those who have reached out directly and participated in user testing sessions with us.

I’m happy to announce that we going to provide you with the following solution:

• Every user will be able to set 'URL’ as their default insertion format instead of the smart link format

• Every user will be able to set this for either all non-Atlassian URLs, or only for specific domains, so that you have the option to continue using some smart links you find useful, but not others

• This setting will overwrite the default insertion format, but still allows you to upgrade your links to smart links after you've inserted them

• This setting will be effective across all Atlassian products you are authenticated with (e.g. Jira, Confluence, Trello).

What are we not doing?

• Admins will not yet be able to perform this setting for all their users. That’s because we want to respect the preference of each content creator. There's a related ticket on this request that you can follow and vote for.

• Smart Links can’t be turned off from a reader's perspective - if the creator of a link inserted a link as a smart link, you will see it as a smart link. That’s because we want to respect content the way it was intended by the author.

Some of you have raised concerns about the security and privacy of our smart links. When conducting our user research we found that in many cases that’s because users believe that when they connect their 3rd party account (e.g. Google Drive) it will also connect it for other users. It is important to understand that when you connect to a 3rd party app and authenticate with it, that connection exists for only you. So, if you authenticate with your 3rd party account (e.g. Google Drive) and insert a link, other users will not automatically be able see that link's information, unless they have also authenticated with the service themselves and have got the permissions required to see it.

We hope that the proposed solution will make working with smart links easier for you, and we are looking forward to receiving your feedback.

Andre | Product Manager, Linking Platform

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Atlassian update - 06 April 2022

Hi everyone!

We've been listening to your feedback, concerns and ideas to improve our Smart Link solution and realised that especially in recent months more and more users were unhappy with the feature. We appreciate all your feedback, and special thanks to those who have used the opportunity to book in with me, to help us understand the problems better so we can find the best solution.

I'm happy to announce that we have prioritzed this issue and are going to work on a solution soon. You can expect an update with details about the solution by the end of April.

Thank you again for your active contribution to help us make our products better!

Andre | Product Manager, Linking Platform

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Hi all!

We are currently looking into different solutions that can address the problems you are experiencing working with Smart Links.

There are different reasons to why the current experience is not ideal for some of your use cases, and we want to make sure we are addressing the most pressing problems first. Some solutions require more time than others, and we want to make sure we can improve the experience incrementally while exploring further possibilities.

I'm happy to announce that you will soon have the option to bypass the Smart Link experience using Cmd+Shift+V when inserting links. We are in the process of implementation and I will update you all once it's available to you.

From the feedback we've received, we know that this will be helpful for many of you, although not the ideal solution for everyone - please know we will continue to explore further. We've received a lot of feedback on the experience of typing text that automatically turns into Smart Links (e.g. when typing file names, domain names or formats) - we will be exploring solutions for these use cases next.

If you want to take a bigger role in helping us build better products, or just want some face-to-face time to express your ideas, please feel free to book in some time with me via https://calendly.com/andremauritz/smart-links-feedback.

Thank you again for all your feedback.

Andre | Product Manager, Linking Platform

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Hi all! My name’s Jonno and I’m the Product Manager that works on the Smart Link feature. Thanks a lot for your feedback. As we’re continuing to improve this feature, understanding use cases like all of yours is super important. From this thread, the three main asks are:  

• Give admins more control around Smart Link behaviour
• Give content creators more flexibility around how they do or don’t use Smart Links when inserting links
• Give content consumers (i.e. those reading links) the ability to set preferences around Smart Link behaviour 

For all three areas, we don’t currently have short term plans but are actively investigating what we could do. We’ll keep this ticket updated as we know more.
 
As as side note, for users who want to insert a simple URL instead of a Smart Link on insertion, there is an alternative approach you can take - simply paste a URL then click CMD + Z (macOS) or CTRL + Z (Windows) once it resolves. 
 
Thanks again for your feedback. If anyone would like to talk directly to me about this feature and your needs, you can book a time to chat over Zoom here - https://calendly.com/jkatahanas/editor
 
Cheers,
Jonno Katahanas | Atlassian Product Manager