A bug was reported where watched-word-links in user fields are incorrectly converted to HTML links, causing visual issues. Users nathank, jessii, JammyDodger, sam, MarcP, and Ahmed_Gagan detailed the problem, noting it affects custom user fields and persists even after updates. The issue was confirmed by multiple users, including nathank and MarcP, who highlighted its impact on profile displays. After investigation, loic and sam acknowledged the issue, and nat announced a fix was implemented in a PR (#20465), which resolved the problem. MarcP confirmed the fix after upgrading.
When a user puts a watched word into a user field, strange things happen.
This is an example using the User Field Employer(s), and having Te Whatu Ora as a watched word link.
Baseline:
Changed field to Te Whatu Ora:
It also changed the field itself:
That watched-words-links are modified so that they do not apply to user_fields.
Not sure about other watched words (didn’t test them).
Hey @nathank – I really enjoy your posts, you always give a good amount of details for what you find!
I see something similar when I do this as well. I put ‘cow goes boo’ as a watched-word-link and when I add it to a user field it shows the full link. However, mine is also showing the first letter of the watched word too. Are you seeing that also? I changed the link, removed and added it to the link list again and it still shows ‘c’ in front of the link:
@nbianca recently improved the implementation per:
https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/17590
Are you running latest?
I can replicate this second issue (version: af912b4b0e):
/admin/customize/watched_words/action/link with a link of https://meta.discourse.org/Yes, running latest (updated after that merge). Seemed to be a new bug to me - maybe related to that code change?
@loic any chances you can have a look at this one?
I’ll have a look 
I can’t reproduce locally. I think this bug has been fixed by this PR which has been merged yesterday:
https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/17445
Are we good to close this? We have no repro, are you on latest @nathank and able to repro?
@nathank assuming this is fixed now, flag to reopen if still an issue.
Apologies Sam, has been a busy couple of weeks.
I’m afraid that the issue remains. To reproduce it you need the user field set to 
Show on public profile?. I was able to do this on a nearly vanilla site as well as my busy / laden with plugins normal site.
It occurs regardless of the case-sensitivity setting, and for Replace as well as Link (and probably the others, but I didn’t test them).
I just noticed watched words > links also work on custom fields.
e.g.
discourse = https://meta.discourse.com
Custom profile field X has value: discourse > it will show the link in the profile field.
I do not think this is expected behavior.
Hi @MarcP
I am testing this on the latest discourse branch test-passed but I am unable to reproduce the issue. Can you share which discourse version are you using?
Before reporting this, I ran a rebuild, so I am on: 2.9.0.beta13 (0cb6d8c8fc).
I noticed this in a user custom field. Whenever I edit the field, and click save, it returns the URL value I specified for the word.
Yes, I am able to reproduce this issue.
here’s the screen recording:
Perfect.
Also notice “Test Custom Field” should have the same header styling as “Web Site”, am I right? The same UI bug is visible on my instance.
I think this has been previously mentioned here When a watched-word-link is in a user field, it is changed to the HTML link (and it looks terrible) as well
@MarcP Nathan has confirmed this is the same issue and has merged your topics for easier tracking.
Just noticed, that this issue is still a thing.
