New user flagged for including links on a post with no links

bug
1

UPDATE: the issue was that the anti-spam algorithm for new users also flags anchor links, so make sure not to include them in your topic templates :sweat_smile:

We had a new user this weekend attempt to make the following post while they were Trust Level 0. When trying to post they kept getting the Sorry, new users are only allowed to put 2 links in a post error, despite their post not having any links.

Is this a bug, or is there something thatā€™s acting as a link here? Iā€™m going to reconfigure the trust levels and error message on our forum so this doesnā€™t happen again, but as far as I can tell nothing should have been flagged.

Here is the post ā€“

Summary

Using Zapier to send Git commit msg hooks to MM team, there is a ā€œlogin to Mattermostā€ phase. Zapier provides this functionality correctly for Github, Gmail, and presumably most of its other integrations. However the ā€œLogin to Mattermostā€ fails ā€“ by actually going to the Mattermost Team/Channel, disabling the Zapier integration creation. I believe this is a Mattermost redirect/callback issue of some sort.

Steps to reproduce

Go to Zapier, set up a Github to MM link (for mattermost without proxy). It will subvert the Zapier process.

Expected behavior

it should login to mattermost and then mattermost should return control to Zapier to complete the testing/creation of the ā€œzapā€.

Observed behavior

After login to Mattermost, the Zapier process is halted and not-returned-to. There is no way to complete.

NB This may be idiosyncrasy of an Ubunti-without-NGINX installation.

Edit ā€“ as I was trying to post this at first, I got the same error while I was trust level 0

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It might be related to the anchor links, I guess. Iā€™ve faced a similar issue before with users mentioning #tags and they counted as links as well (IMHO, they should both be discounted).

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Oh interesting, he was just following our template for that topic so I bet this isnā€™t the first time this has happened. Iā€™ll take those out and retest, thank you!

Edit ā€“ yep that was it, after changing the template from anchor links to just bolded text I was able to submit it as a new user

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Oh the anchor links are somewhat of new feature!

I think we should bypass them here. I think you are on to a legit bug here, we should get it fixed.

Thanks heaps for posting the workaround.

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Definitely seeing this problem on https://caddy.community as well. Multiple users in the past few days have been complaining about not being able to post when using our help topic template. :roll_eyes:

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I implemented a fix for this bug and a few other smaller bugs related to anchor links:

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/12683

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