Forum Discussion
Problem inserting links
Not seen this before, error when inserting a link, to Microsoft support articles and discussions here, I get an error, happened a few times today (annoying!)
Anyone else seeing this...
- Hi all,
Thanks for reporting, this was caused by some extra filtering on number strings due to a large number of spam posts coming in with phone numbers in them.
Unfortunately this has he side effect of preventing posting legitimate posts that have matching number strings in them. If we changed the regex to only prevent posts that were in the format of n(nnn)-nnn-nnnn then spammers would just not post in that format.
I am keeping it under review and may well turn off the block again in the mean time my advice would be to avoid posting strings of numbers if at all possible.
#MeToo
- Allen
Community Manager
Hi all,
Thanks for reporting, this was caused by some extra filtering on number strings due to a large number of spam posts coming in with phone numbers in them.
Unfortunately this has he side effect of preventing posting legitimate posts that have matching number strings in them. If we changed the regex to only prevent posts that were in the format of n(nnn)-nnn-nnnn then spammers would just not post in that format.
I am keeping it under review and may well turn off the block again in the mean time my advice would be to avoid posting strings of numbers if at all possible.Allen, thank you for the clarification. For a while we will survive with this, but hope you'll find another solution.
On the one hand phone numbers could be without dashes (I usually use them with spaces notation).
On the other hand with some resources becomes harder to work (URLs, Excel discussions with numbers inside, etc.)
Thanks Allen, appreciate the background information. Unfornatunely this catches out a lot of support.office.com articles, which will match those patterns.
I can work around this and I understand blocking spam must be a priority. I can use alternatives, which works fine, not necessarily ideal but it does the trick.
- AllenI’ll check this and get back to you.
The filter shouldn’t prevent posting urls with numbers as long as you change the text to click here rather than providing the full subject of the post / page your linking to
