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:
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?
@flink91 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:
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.
