Hyperlinked body text still broken and getting worse

[NecessaryScene]

At some point we stopped being able to do YouTube links in text, as the software decided to auto-substitute a "preview embed", but now this seems to have progressed to any site it decides it can do a sort of preview on.

Which means if I try to have some text in a link, using the (open 2 square brackets) (URL) (text) (close 2 square brackets) markup, I usually lose the text.

This is annoying when writing new posts, as there's no way to just quietly add a citation to a piece of text, but it must be really destructive to archived posts using this mark-up - lots of things must now be unreadable.

Can you please constrain the auto-embedding to free-floating URLs that are NOT being applied to text?

Or at the very least make sure that when there is text it is not replaced?

I'm finding hyperlinks completely unpredictable. Are we not meant to be able to do free-floating URLs any more? They seem to just be deleted when the post is published. Embedded URLs work sometimes, YouTube previews 'work' (If you actually wanted them in the first place, which I typically don't but have no choice as you say @NecessaryScene ) mostly but not always.

Hi there,
How frustrating this sounds (and a little baffling if we're honest). Let us raise it with Tech and get back to you.

Hi again.

Thanks for your patience with this and thanks for flagging it to us. We will look in to changing this but it's not a quick fix so it may take a bit of time for us to get it done. We'll update once it's sorted.