YouTube truncating external links

[Mick Bailey]

I published a couple of videos with links to MEF, but in the published content the link is truncated and has three dots ... on the end, resulting in it being inoperative. The link is correct in the editor. I've tried the suggestions I could find - editing the text in Studio, also pasting the links from a text editor, but these don't make any difference.

Has anyone got any idea of what I need to do to fix this, and what the reason for the truncation is?

[TomCarlos]

I published a couple of videos with links to MEF, but in the published content the link is truncated and has three dots ... on the end, resulting in it being inoperative. The link is correct in the editor. I've tried the suggestions I could find - editing the text in Studio, also pasting the links from a text editor, but these don't make any difference.

Has anyone got any idea of what I need to do to fix this, and what the reason for the truncation is?

Mick, what if we copy and paste a link as "text" and do not convert it to a URL using the link button? I know some links might be long but a viewer can copy and paste the link in a browser instead of launching the browser app?

[g1]

Please link an example post with one of the links that doesn't work.
For myself, I always use the 'insert video' button so it is embedded here ad free. But I know some people just add a link, and usually I think they are truncated like that but still work, but I may be mistaken.

[g1]

Sorry, I think I misunderstood your post. You are publishing the links on youtube, not vice versa. Links are to MEF posts.

[Mick Bailey]

The link is inserted as text but still truncates in the published version, which looks to me as though the software is still identifying the link within plain text. Here's how it appears in this example;

https://youtu.be/MhTZyPiJ7UM

[TomCarlos]

I too misunderstood.... Mick is trying to add a link to MEF in his YouTube video.

Mick, did you follow the directions as outlined in this link - https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-put-m...deo-on-YouTube

[Mick Bailey]

I'm not part of the partner program so any links would not be clickable, but I'm OK with viewers copy/pasting a text-only link. It's unclear how to do anything different with the text - I cleared the description, saved the video without it, then edited the video again with the text pasted from my laptop text editor. It still truncates the text when published yet retains the full URL when I go back into the editor. There's some dynamic process that's disabling the text link that isn't clear why/what's going on. I'll do an experiment to see if links to other sites do the same thing.

EDIT: I've worked around this by removing anything that suggests to YouTube that its a link - removed https:// from the beginning and the post # from the end. The link works fine when pasted into Google. This seems to be a way YouTube uses to prevent anyone from embedding a link in text. I read that this is to prevent anyone from linking to illicit or illegal external sites.

[g1]

I've worked around this by removing anything that suggests to YouTube that its a link - removed https:// from the beginning and the post # from the end. The link works fine when pasted into Google. This seems to be a way YouTube uses to prevent anyone from embedding a link in text. I read that this is to prevent anyone from linking to illicit or illegal external sites.

I think this is how you will have to do it, and your explanation of why they forbid it makes sense. So you will have to do old-school style where we would give an email address that was not discoverable by the old spam-bots, and add a note like "use @ symbol instead of at, and period instead of dot" or similar.
I think some youtubers may also insert an image of the link into the video.

[Tom Phillips]

The link is inserted as text but still truncates in the published version, which looks to me as though the software is still identifying the link within plain text. Here's how it appears in this example;

https://youtu.be/MhTZyPiJ7UM

I 'm not sure what's going on after reading everyone's replies. However, I can report that the link in your post #5 does work for me. One click on that link opens the YouTube video of your guitar synth demo.

[The Dude]

Tom,
If I've got this right, the problem isn't with linking to YouTube videos. It's with the link in the description of the YouTube video back to MEF.

[Tom Phillips]

Tom,
If I've got this right, the problem isn't with linking to YouTube videos. It's with the link in the description of the YouTube video back to MEF.

OK. I understand now. It looks to me that the link back to MEF in the YouTube text is missing the https:// prefix. Perhaps that's why it doesn't work.

[pdf64]

OK. I understand now. It looks to me that the link back to MEF in the YouTube text is missing the https:// prefix. Perhaps that's why it doesn't work.

It's not a link per se.
For its regular users, Youtube seems to automatically disable links in the description text of uploaded videos.
Mick's workaround is to post the web address for ghe thread. Just copy it and paste into the browser and hey presto