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There is a similar question here but the person answering said it is not possible. I have to believe he did not understand the question...

So I apologize for asking again... I can paste an entire url into a description field in asana and it will render as a link. But I can't figure out how to shorten it to something like <a href="myurl">short text</a> or [short text](myurl)

Community
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Denis Roarty
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Unfortunately, he's right: we don't let there be different text for the link than the text in the url, so it's not possible to have a link to <a href="myurl">short text</a>, only things like <a href="http://myurl.com">http://myurl.com</a>. This is somewhat mitigated by the fact that we'll truncate the url when displaying in an Asana text box (it will run on for some characters, then terminate with "..."), so extremely long urls shouldn't cause too many text layout issues. This is enforced at render time, so there's not a way to do this with the API either.

There are a number of reasons for this - security, as he mentioned, is one; more clarity is better here. We've got some customers that don't want to enable, for instance, <a href="http://hijacker.com/pwned">example.com<\a> links that their non-technical users might encounter without thinking about it - basically, they don't want the same level of paranoia in Asana as is required to be a responsible email user, so we went WYSIWYG here.

I'd be interested, however, if you could come up with a compelling use case for why this is necessary. We're always up for getting feedback!

Matt
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    Use case for URL linked text? How about readability? Or overload of irrelevant information? Or the fact that it allows the writer to create distinct links which will otherwise be practically identical (e.g. links to two different files in a github repo)? I think that, when even HTML supports this as a basic feature for years already, and that even the most paranoid forums provide this functionality, you can't just dismiss it as a security feature and ask for a "compelling use case". If you have some users with different preferences, an admin project-level setting should do the trick... – Oren S Nov 22 '17 at 14:48