SOS: Serious Overload of Series discussion

Goodreads • Aug 17, 2021 • Announcement:

Disabled direct message previews and comment links to external sites

We take the responsibility of protecting our customers’ security seriously. We have disabled text previews from direct messages in Goodreads email notifications and links to external sites from appearing in user comments, after detecting a suspicious pattern of message and comment activity from some accounts.

This is part of our work to deter spam and protect our community, and we'll provide updates directly on Goodreads Help on the status of these issues.

I did find out that while you can no longer utilize GR's HTML (<*a href="https://www.goodreads.com">my link text<*/a> *without asterisks) to customize your external links, you can continue to share the URL (ie: www.goodreads.com)

I'm not sure if this is a temporary or permanant change.

Dragana shared (on our freebie thread), that now NO external links are allowed, in any format.

I checked GR help page and found this question from today ...
(if you wanna search help and follow, click on the star in the right corner and mark "bookmark":

User3854821009305819027 (Member) asked a question.
15h ago
Today I can't edit past comments of mine. I get a message saying that I can't post outside links, but I don't have any href links in the text. Why won't it let me post?

What I've tried ....

~ Posting external links in a private GR group: FAIL
~ Altering external links with random symbols: FAIL

Is this what they've done to try and combat all the spam??? 🙄🙄🙄 As if that is going to stop it.

OR... is for some other nefarious reason that we will find out in months to come?

FYI another change they have made is defaulted everyone's settings to only friends can send us DM's which of course doesn't help with groups sending out group messages and other legitimate reasons we message each other. You have to change the setting back to everyone in your profile. Sorry if this has been mentioned elsewhere in the group but I wanted to let anyone who wasn't aware know.

That’s what the first help message I saw said their reason was, but who knows. Whatever the reason, it’s gonna be a mess because I’m sure all/most groups use outside links.

Thanks for letting everyone know about the profile/message change.

I hope they fix this soon, I can't share links in my reviews either. :/
Or reply to comments/posts that contain links if in the quoted text there is a link.

Thanks for keeping us updated Steph <3

Of course. Thanks to y’all for sharing, as well 😊

Good news! Started working again this morning for me. Hopefully for you too. :)

Yep, looks like they're back :)

Yay! 😁

thank god!

And also Groups can now override the GR changed privacy settings, so we can broadcast messages again. Not that it affected us too much as we like to keep broadcasts to a minimum.

https://help.goodreads.com/s/article/...

👍🏼😊 thanks