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Note URLs


danhash

Idea

I have the latest public Evernote release - 6.0.6.1769 (301769) Public, running on Windows 7 64-bit.

When I paste a URL into the text of a note, the URL is automatically added to the "URL" field (visible by clicking the "Info" button). I have many notes which have multiple URLs in the note text; for these notes, only the first URL pasted is added to the "URL" field. It is rather frustrating to have the "URL" field add a URL automatically when a URL is pasted in the note text, especially if I have a note with many links in it (since only the first one gets saved in that field). Imagine a note which lists 20 articles I'd like to read; what is the use of having the first article URL stored as the note URL?

Unfortunately, once I remove the note URL from the Info section, Evernote adds the URL back, sometimes seemingly at random. There is no way to permanently remove the note URL and keep it blank, since Evernote continues to re-populate that field.

It would be a much better user experience not to auto-populate the note URL and let the user populate the URL if they want to.

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I did open a support ticket, and I was told in the support ticket to submit my idea here rather than in a ticket.

If I am creating a list of, say, Wikipedia articles I am interested in, I'm not going to create one note per URL if my intention is simply to have a list of links.

Let's say that I have a list of 10 URLs in a note. Evernote will add the very first URL as the note URL, so I will remove the note URL. Now, if I paste an 11th URL, now that 11th URL is added as the note URL. You can clearly see that in this case, the note URL has no useful function, so I should be able to disable the functionality with automatically adds a new URL for pasted content. If you copy and paste a quote from a website, Evernote will also add the URL you copied the text from as the note URL, even if there was no URL in the text that was copied.

As far as Evernote randomly adding note URLs back, it may not be a "truly random" occurrence, I'm sure there is something I am doing to trigger the URL being added back, but it's not something I am aware of doing, which means that Evernote is triggering this functionality based on non-obvious interaction with the application, which creates a poor user experience.

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@emerick, pasting with Ctrl+Shift+V does not solve the problem. Also, multiple times recently I have noticed the Note URL being automatically populated randomly, without user interaction.

Even if all I do is copy text from a website (text without a URL) and paste it in the note, and I then remove the Note URL, then at a random time in the future, the Note URL populates back with the URL that I already hand-removed (the URL that was not present in the text that I copied).

It seems that in this case Evernote is going out of its way to forcibly add the Note URL back that I obviously do not want there.

@s2sailor, yes it matters if the Note URL is there, because it has literally nothing to do with the purpose of the note, and it continually gets added back despite my intentional attempts to remove it.

@Enertse, I did raise a support ticket, because this is clearly unwanted (and unwarranted) behavior, but I was told by Evernote Support that I had to submit my bug report here, and my ticket was closed.

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On 7/11/2016 at 11:25 PM, kvitekp said:

@danhash Evernote populates SourceURL attribute when it is empty and user pastes text from the clipboard with one of the clipboard formats containing url of the page the text was copied from. This typically happens when you copy text from the browser and paste it into a note, or drag and drop. Most of the time it's very convenient to have a reference back to the original page -- you have your local copy stored in Evernote in case online page goes away, and also a reference to the source material, if you need to revisit it. In fact, this is very popular feature: quite a few Evernote notes are created with this automatic source url, so it must be useful.

There is no code that populates SourceURL field based on the note content, so the "randomly" populated note SourceURL you see come from you copy/pasting text into your note.

If you don't want clipboard SourceURL to be associated with the note every time you paste web page text, click "Info" button and add a few spaces into note URL. Blank SourceURL will not be shown in the Note Info panel and non empty Source URL will prevent new SourceURL added to the note when you paste.

@kvitekp:

Your solution is to populate the Note URL field with bogus data on 100% of the notes that I create so that the Note URL field doesn't get auto-populated. I have thousands of notes, and I create new notes very frequently, so it would be wildly ridiculous to try to go through all of my notes and add spaces. The fix to this problem is to add an option to disable this "feature".

In addition, the Note URL does get randomly re-populated after it is removed. This means that Evernote is re-adding something that was specifically manually removed. This is not a feature; this is a bug.

(Edit: removed text about Evernote not letting you remove the URL in some cases; it turns out that this is a separate issue which I opened a support ticket on)

Edited by danhash
removed text about a separate issue that I opened a support ticket on
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What does a user (a premium user I might add) have to do to get a bug fixed? I open a support ticket, which is closed saying I should post about it here. I post about it here, and multiple Evernote employees tell me the buggy behavior is expected and is actually a feature.

"It's not a bug, it's a feature"

Nice one, Evernote.

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On 7/17/2016 at 2:27 AM, gustavgi said:

My guess is that it's hard to develop a system that knows if you want to populate the url field or not, when pasting from the internet. I myself think it's great that Evernote automatically adds the url for easy access and a quick shortcut to the source.

But I think it would be easier to understand your request if you expain the root of your frustration. Why is it a problem? In the user case you are mentioning it is not privacy at least

For myself, I can see that a root cause might be that it's a bit "annoying" to have a non-relevant web adress displayed in the always visible UI, next to the tags in the note panel. But such visual UI annoyances are probably more likely to change if you request for an implementation of a UI option to show/display url. I could get behind that type of request, since I would prefer to have the url "hidden" in the Info section of the note. I have no recurring need for a web adress to show all the time, taking up precious tag-space.

For one, it is a potential privacy issue, although not a serious one. When I copy and paste text into Evernote, how is Evernote even getting the source URL? Even if the text I copy doesn't have a URL in it at all, Evernote still knows the URL and adds it to the source URL field of the note. Why is Evernote tracking URLs without my explicit permission?

But more importantly (and more practically), the URL that text was copied from is often completely unrelated to the text itself. As an example, let's say a friend emails me a joke, and I want to save the joke, so I copy and paste it from Gmail into Evernote. Evernote will add a Gmail URL to the source URL field, but the Gmail URL is completely unrelated to the text I just pasted.

The source URL re-populating after having been manually cleared is a true bug/defect. The source URL populating with a URL that is not wanted or relevant is either a bug or an unwanted "feature", depending on how you look at it; in any case, there should be an easy way to disable it, because there are many situations where this is not helpful or is even annoying.

On 7/19/2016 at 11:53 AM, Austin G said:

@danhash I've created a follow-up ticket # 1737381 to review this further. 

Thanks Austin!

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On 4/6/2018 at 12:51 AM, Jookman said:

I know where the options are. When I run an import and add a few 10s of notes, you are asking me to spend more time adding spaces, instead of having a simpler option to turn off inclusion of the URL. Or just turn it off and not show it with every note. The URL can be turned off in the side list, but it still shows with the note. See my screenshot5ac6fca9934ea_ENurl.jpg.f1893f975717cb5633eccccfda0446fc.jpg

 

This is something that has been bugging me as well. Sometimes the URL is so long that I only see one tag and I operate with tags more than anything. So I hit F3 to add a tag, I get a pop up box now. Also I cannot see what the tags are for this note unless I click the arrows

On top of that, the clipped email from Outlook for example has a link which is nice in theory but since I processed that email I already moved it out of Inbox and archived it. So when I click the outlook.office.com link as shown below, I just get my email inbox, not the original email. It sure is useless at that time.

I definitely the see the reason and usefulness of this idea and it does come in handy for website links but it does need tweaking to handle situations like these. There is an option to clear the link which could be cumbersome if you are doing it for everything you import and asking the question "Will this link work, or do I need it" every time.

image.png.1eca1b60fc54380b6c91921071012930.png

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On 7/17/2016 at 2:27 AM, gustavgi said:

My guess is that it's hard to develop a system that knows if you want to populate the url field or not,

Um, how about a preference in options? It can't be that complicated for a yes or no setting can it? Why force something someone does not want? Give a yes or no option. It's Evernote, not Falcon 9.

Why is this an issue? One acronym: OCD.

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2 minutes ago, CalS said:

Does the URL screen space actually change with a longer address?  Mine seems to be the same amount of screen real estate no matter the length of the URL.

It does for me. See below where the 3 arrows line up in relationship to the reminder clock icon.

There is one case (which I couldn't find a sample for) where the path to a file is super long, then I can only see one tag! But that applies to files exported I think, it was not website URLs. Nonetheless, it was taking up a lot of space.

 

image.png.607a8ee60cb7b37ec542c88b8bbaceff.png

 

image.png.c0740aa5729d9f5826136166e40d8cb1.png

 

image.png.1b652e09ec35d17424e56f3097712ae5.png

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Hi.  What's wrong with the idea of having one URL per note and creating new notes rather than adding more and more content into one note?  Titles and tags will keep notes from one document or session all together.

I've not seen Evernote 'randomly adding back' a URL to a note - if this does happen to you I'd strongly suggest that you raise a support ticket.

It is,  of course, already part of the package to permit users to list as many URLs as they require in a note.

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On 6/1/2016 at 3:49 PM, danhash said:

It would be a much better user experience not to auto-populate the note URL and let the user populate the URL if they want to

I find the auto-populate feature useful but I can see how it's of little use if there are links within a note, but if you are pasting links into a note does it matter what shows in the URL field?  The field seems redundant to me at that point.  Just trying to understand your use case.

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I have noticed this; you were right to raise a support ticket.

When I add a URL to a note that is essentially a collection of URLs, occasionally the note URL is set. I do not want to set the note URL because the note is of my creation. Auto-populating the note URL assumes that the note has been clipped from the Internet.

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@danhash Evernote populates SourceURL attribute when it is empty and user pastes text from the clipboard with one of the clipboard formats containing url of the page the text was copied from. This typically happens when you copy text from the browser and paste it into a note, or drag and drop. Most of the time it's very convenient to have a reference back to the original page -- you have your local copy stored in Evernote in case online page goes away, and also a reference to the source material, if you need to revisit it. In fact, this is very popular feature: quite a few Evernote notes are created with this automatic source url, so it must be useful.

There is no code that populates SourceURL field based on the note content, so the "randomly" populated note SourceURL you see come from you copy/pasting text into your note.

If you don't want clipboard SourceURL to be associated with the note every time you paste web page text, click "Info" button and add a few spaces into note URL. Blank SourceURL will not be shown in the Note Info panel and non empty Source URL will prevent new SourceURL added to the note when you paste.

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23 hours ago, danhash said:

I did raise a support ticket, because this is clearly unwanted (and unwarranted) behavior, but I was told by Evernote Support that I had to submit my bug report here, and my ticket was closed.

 
 

 To confirm, the best place to post feature requests is here. Most other issues are best submitted by ticket. Since the behavior you're experiencing is expected, a post here to request a change was ultimately correct. Thanks for your feedback and insight. 

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On 6/10/2016 at 4:21 PM, danhash said:

Let's say that I have a list of 10 URLs in a note. Evernote will add the very first URL as the note URL, so I will remove the note URL. Now, if I paste an 11th URL, now that 11th URL is added as the note URL. You can clearly see that in this case, the note URL has no useful function, so I should be able to disable the functionality with automatically adds a new URL for pasted content. If you copy and paste a quote from a website, Evernote will also add the URL you copied the text from as the note URL, even if there was no URL in the text that was copied.

 

On 7/11/2016 at 9:23 PM, danhash said:

@emerick, pasting with Ctrl+Shift+V does not solve the problem. Also, multiple times recently I have noticed the Note URL being automatically populated randomly, without user interaction.

Even if all I do is copy text from a website (text without a URL) and paste it in the note, and I then remove the Note URL, then at a random time in the future, the Note URL populates back with the URL that I already hand-removed (the URL that was not present in the text that I copied).

It seems that in this case Evernote is going out of its way to forcibly add the Note URL back that I obviously do not want there.

@s2sailor, yes it matters if the Note URL is there, because it has literally nothing to do with the purpose of the note, and it continually gets added back despite my intentional attempts to remove it.

@Enertse, I did raise a support ticket, because this is clearly unwanted (and unwarranted) behavior, but I was told by Evernote Support that I had to submit my bug report here, and my ticket was closed.

Just want to say that I often create notes, for a variety of purposes, in ways similarly to what danhash describes. I don't mind having the URL field populated, but it's not particularly useful in those kinds of notes. It might be good to have something in Settings to keep it from ever happening; but then for me there would be times when I would want it to happen in Web Clipper notes. kvitekp's kludge is, well, kludgey. I'll try using Clear in the drop-down next to the Source URL field, and hope that it won't repopulate on its own.

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On 7/12/2016 at 8:56 PM, Austin G said:

 To confirm, the best place to post feature requests is here. Most other issues are best submitted by ticket. Since the behavior you're experiencing is expected, a post here to request a change was ultimately correct. Thanks for your feedback and insight. 

The behavior of randomly re-adding information to a field that has manually been removed is expected?

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12 minutes ago, danhash said:

What does a user (a premium user I might add) have to do to get a bug fixed? 

Get the agreement of other users that this is a high priority item.

You've started that process by posting in this forum and users can indicate their Screen Shot 2016-07-16 at 8.22.29 PM.pngsupport using the voting buttons in the top left corner.

 

There are many bugs and features to be worked.  We can provide feedback as to the priority

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3 hours ago, danhash said:

What does a user (a premium user I might add) have to do to get a bug fixed? I open a support ticket, which is closed saying I should post about it here. I post about it here, and multiple Evernote employees tell me the buggy behavior is expected and is actually a feature.

"It's not a bug, it's a feature"

Nice one, Evernote.

My guess is that it's hard to develop a system that knows if you want to populate the url field or not, when pasting from the internet. I myself think it's great that Evernote automatically adds the url for easy access and a quick shortcut to the source.

But I think it would be easier to understand your request if you expain the root of your frustration. Why is it a problem? In the user case you are mentioning it is not privacy at least

For myself, I can see that a root cause might be that it's a bit "annoying" to have a non-relevant web adress displayed in the always visible UI, next to the tags in the note panel. But such visual UI annoyances are probably more likely to change if you request for an implementation of a UI option to show/display url. I could get behind that type of request, since I would prefer to have the url "hidden" in the Info section of the note. I have no recurring need for a web adress to show all the time, taking up precious tag-space.

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18 hours ago, danhash said:

For one, it is a potential privacy issue, although not a serious one. When I copy and paste text into Evernote, how is Evernote even getting the source URL? Even if the text I copy doesn't have a URL in it at all, Evernote still knows the URL and adds it to the source URL field of the note. Why is Evernote tracking URLs without my explicit permission?

When you copy text from a web browser, the browser (typically) populates the clipboard with the copied text and metadata that includes the source URL. That metadata is intentionally publicly available to all clipboard clients.

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A reference for the clipboard security issue: http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/33428/is-a-password-in-the-clipboard-vulnerable-to-attacks. It's theoretically a security issue, but it's not really, unless you're infected with malware of some sort. Similar situations are occasionally called out by Raymond Chen in his Old New Thing blog, usually with a title involving "It rather involved being on the other side of this airtight hatchway", lifted from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, i.e.: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20150422-00/?p=44183

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On ‎17‎.‎07‎.‎2016 at 8:27 AM, gustavgi said:

My guess is that it's hard to develop a system that knows if you want to populate the url field or not, when pasting from the internet. I myself think it's great that Evernote automatically adds the url for easy access and a quick shortcut to the source.

But I think it would be easier to understand your request if you expain the root of your frustration. Why is it a problem? In the user case you are mentioning it is not privacy at least

For myself, I can see that a root cause might be that it's a bit "annoying" to have a non-relevant web adress displayed in the always visible UI, next to the tags in the note panel. But such visual UI annoyances are probably more likely to change if you request for an implementation of a UI option to show/display url. I could get behind that type of request, since I would prefer to have the url "hidden" in the Info section of the note. I have no recurring need for a web adress to show all the time, taking up precious tag-space.

Yes, it is really annoying!

Just like danhash, I have a lot of notes with many web links in it. Having an arbitrary one of the links of a note displayed as "the" source is useless and misleading information.

I never want this behaviour and I don't see a reason why this shouldn't bee an option which can be turned off globally.

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When I view a page using Clearly and add it to EN it adds a source URL that looks like this: chrome-extension://iooicodkiihhpojmmeghjclgihfjdjhj/front/in_isolation/reformat.html

When I import a bunch of image files from an import folder EN adds a source URL that looks like this: D:\xxxxx\xxxxx\clips\21062010886.jpg - why would I need this? Of what use is the URL telling me the image came from the import folder?

EN also adds file paths as source URLs. Like, I have copied over a few cells from an Excel sheet into EN and i get a URL like this: file:///D://financial_budget.xlsx - If I move the file reorganising my work, the URL becomes useless.

There are plenty more examples. from gmail, from feedly... these are all URLs that are not static, need additional authentication and so on. In all these cases the URLs are useless. Why can't you provide an option to turn off automatic addition of source URLs instead of deciding for me which URLs are good?

The useless URL takes up valuable real estate. On Windows EN, in the side list view it takes away the space that I can actually use for viewing more tags, and also for adding more tags. At the least, provide an option to turn off showing the URL

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@Jookman - see the post above from @kvitekp about adding spaces to the URL to avoid additions/ changes;  and if you don't want to see the URL in side list view,  it's already possible to switch this off and to choose from a variety of other options:  right click the heading bar in that window for choices -

5ac614748ec05_ScreenClip3.png.bc43838299efcc0073f7abf6d06938b8.png

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I know where the options are. When I run an import and add a few 10s of notes, you are asking me to spend more time adding spaces, instead of having a simpler option to turn off inclusion of the URL. Or just turn it off and not show it with every note. The URL can be turned off in the side list, but it still shows with the note. See my screenshot5ac6fca9934ea_ENurl.jpg.f1893f975717cb5633eccccfda0446fc.jpg

 

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Hmmn.  I don't see a way to default whether or not to capture the URL without offending 50% of the user-base whichever option Evernote choose,  but it could certainly be simpler to have an option to switch off the URL view within a note - that option affecting the overall display of notes unless/ until changed.  Maybe that's a feature that can be added in a future update?

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2 hours ago, TK0047 said:

Sometimes the URL is so long that I only see one tag and I operate with tags more than anything.

Does the URL screen space actually change with a longer address?  Mine seems to be the same amount of screen real estate no matter the length of the URL.

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Got it.  I took a look and mine doesn't change that much.  Seems to display the address up to the .com.  But I'm using a wide monitor, even in side list view there is quite a bit of real estate.

ScreenClip.png.110433817d83c39fdfbca9ce4920a5fe.png

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34 minutes ago, danhash said:

Bumping this. This is still a problem and has not been fixed.

Hi.  Please don't bump posts - it's against Forum rules.  The general silence on this might be something to do with the ongoing work on new-style apps that are due to be released later this year.  The stated aim was to give a standard look and feel to the app across all devices.  This may have been one of the issues taken on board to be part of the new releases,  but it can't be released on its own - the whole package has to be completed.  If that doesn't include changes you require,  then is the time to make noise - and hopefully Evernote will be able to react more quickly with a modern architecture.  Meantime though they're not going to give an increasingly competitive market advance notice what their new features will look like... no comments before release.

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