Auto hyperlink on tickets

Hey Stephen!

The only way to disable the auto-linking function would be to disable rich text formatting completely, which I imagine you wouldn't want to do.

What your agents can do, when something gets linked that they don't want to be, is remove the link with just a couple clicks.

If the agent clicks on the linked text, a little light box will pop up with a pencil icon and a trash can icon. If they click the trash can icon, the link will be removed and the text will display normally:

I did a little bit of extra testing and was also able to discover that this will work when you're creating/editing macros. So if your agents apply macros that have text that shouldn't be hyperlinked, you can edit those macros to remove the link in the same way as described above, and when the macro is applied the text will not be linked.

I know it's more of a manual process, but hopefully it helps!

I have the same feature request. While you can click on the little trash can to remove the link, it will just keep coming back. It is a real nuisance. I removed the link three times while typing a response to a customer, made sure it was not blue when I clicked send, and it still hyperlinked!

Agree with Courtney - you can remove it, but often when you submit the ticket, the link returns and now you are stuck.

Hi Hillary!

I'm not able to duplicate that on my end...what browser are you using?

Jessie, I'm using Chrome.

I am also using Chrome.

Hey Hillary and Courtney! Sorry for the delayed response.

Can you tell me what version of Chrome you're using? I tested this again a couple times in Chrome 63.0.3239.132 and the unlinking action stuck when I submitted the ticket.

@Jessie, this is definitely still happening and is not limited to agent replies; for example, if a customer types in # immediately next to a number when communicating within a ticket, Zendesk will autolink the string (e.g. #000).  Is there a solution to stop this from happening?  This leads to broken links that is not the intended user experience when there shouldn't be a link to a ticket.  Thank you!

Hi Abisay! Welcome to the Community!

I'm afraid there isn't a way to disable the auto-link function in Zendesk. Is this something that comes up frequently in your tickets?

A little late to the party, but we're immediately finding this within our processes which often include having agents provide things like order numbers in the format "order #1234". Customers also frequently write in with this information. In these cases we end up with links littered throughout the tickets that appear to be functional and intended, but when clicked they end up taking end-users and agents to tickets or error pages.

Thanks for sharing, Colin. 

This is also impacting us. We have some clients who want to track work on development tickets for them and ask us to provide them with the Jira ticket numbers, so we'd like to phrase that "ticket #1234" but it's not clear to our agents until the ticket is submitted that the hyperlink's been created. At that point our clients click the link thinking they can go there to access their ticket, and they get an error message. 

Hi,

Is there any possibility to deactivate any hyperlink that comes from End-users? 

The goal here is to avoid that an URL from a customer to be cliecked by mistake by the agent that is working on that specific ticket.

If there is a solution, this will be the same for the agents? I don't wish to be applied in the other way around because agents should have the possibility to send an url that has the hyperlink activated.

Thank you,

Violeta

It would be great to have the ability to customize this behavior or to turn it off completely.  In our case, there are many file extensions that are discussed on tickets that falsely trigger the hyperlinking.  I've love to see a blacklist of TLD that do not trigger the hyperlinking or perhaps the ability to require a http/https prefix before automatically creating the hyperlink.  

As a new Zendesk customer, it's negatively impacting our agents adoption of the new system.  

Hello,

We're also running into the issue if we add in a jira ticket number like #1234 it auto hyperlinks and will link to a ticket in Zendesk, but throw an error message that the page doesn't exist. Has anyone found a way around this? 

Best regards,

Ryan

Hi Ryan - 

From the Zendesk side of things, we don't have anything to add to Jessie's suggestions above. However, we'll keep the thread open in case other users have any suggestions, and we'll share the feedback here with a product manager. 

Hi

This is completely incredible

We use in macros a template that contains xx.xxx.xxx  for the agent to modify with a real article number

The impact on customers is that the recceive a hyperlink to a SEX website !!!

I think a blocker on this functionality is a MUST HAVE !

High risk on brand image

Hi Nelson, 

That definitely isn’t good.  I would suggest modifying your macros that use the multiple x’s that way to avoid that particular use case as .xxx is a domain that tends to be dedicated to that industry.  

As the official comment at the top calls out, you can remove hyperlinks from macros to prevent this from happening as well - but it’s still possible that a user’s email client or browser might try to smartly identify these sorts of elements and re-convert them back to links as well.

This presents a significant security concern, especially given how easy it is to receive phishing emails with malicious links that ultimately turn into Zendesk tickets.

Please provide a configuration option to turn off auto-hyperlinks without having to give up rich text formatting altogether!

Adding another vote to how receiving end user messages with urls as hyperlinks is a security concern.  A setting to turn them off or filter a list of them like the automatic redaction of numbers would be an improvement.