Where to contact forums bug?

URL shorteners are useful, but they're also a necessary evil, because:

1) they obscure the actual link, which is bad for a few obvious reasons

2) if/when the service goes out of business, then your link is useless (even worse, what if the service gets sold to a malicious actor?)

Ofc, these days nobody cares about any link/content older than 5 days, so it doesn't really matter.

Garmin itself broke the links to old posts in this forum when they transitioned to the current platform.

Some links on their own official site for devs which point back to old forum topics are broken.

WillNorthYork said:

1) they obscure the actual link, which is bad for a few obvious reasons

I usually use a service that reveals the real URL before I click on the shortened URL, but I guess most people don't do that.

Exactly. A forum should just correctly auto makes links, external shorteners for such case are big no, because above reasons. I usually won't click on obscured links, unless there is no other option then I use Virus Total or similar checkers. Currently long links here can be pasted using Insert -> Link so it's kinda ok, but fixing auto linking would be good.

And a little test:

With a space after:

https://connect.garmin.com/modern/proxy/badgechallenge-service/badgeChallenge/F5555622CAC247549468E95C91708474 

https://forums.garmin.com/apps-software/mobile-apps-web/f/garmin-connect-web/253049/where-to-contact-forums-bug/

Just pasted:

connect.garmin.com/.../F5555622CAC247549468E95C91708474

forums.garmin.com/.../

It looks that it matters for what a link is.

BunBun! said:

It looks that it matters for what a link is.

Yes I typically have to use brackets around a Garmin Connect Web link. 

This will work [https://connect.garmin.com/modern/import-data]

This will not work https://connect.garmin.com/modern/import-data

Garmin should've gone with a robust and modern forum solution like NodeBB or even Discourse, but for some reason they chose this platform which has a ton of issues (like just try navigating a very long discussion in parts of the forum which still have infinite scroll).

I like their products (for some reason), but everything to do with their software (whether it's on the watch or on their website) seems to have a ton of issues.

Hehe, being myself quite dyslexic, and sloppy in typing, I can understand it, but it surprised me anyway, that in the years of using the forum I did not notice there is a typo in the URL of the GC Mobile Android forum, and I also did not see anyone else mentioning it either

The last folder of the GC Mobile Android forum address tells garmin-connect-mobile-andriod insted of garmin-connect-mobile-android

BTW, the links are still being messed up in the GC Web forum, though it seems to work all right in most other forums I visit here. Is there really no way to fix it in the GCW forum too? 

Well, as usually, it is uncertain anyone from Garmin will see this post here, but I know moderators will notice it, and forward if necessary.

BTW, if admins decide fixing the typo in the URL, they should not forget to add a permanent redirecting of the original wrong address to the new fixed one, otherwise thousands of links pointing to old threads and posts will get broken.

Garmin doesn't care about breaking old links, as all the old links to posts from before the forum platform was changed a couple of years ago are now broken, even links in their own developer FAQ:

https://developer.garmin.com/connect-iq/connect-iq-faq/how-do-i-create-a-connect-iq-background-service/

I’ve created a very basic watch face with a background service on the developer forum and included a .zip

^ broken links

of the project in the first post so you can see the code and try it out yourself. The watch face itself displays the time, and the last data seen from the background service (plus a counter, etc). And all the background does is return a string with an “hh:mm” timestamp. While it isn’t useful, it does show the basics of backgrounding with a temporal event. In this case, there’s really isn’t much in the View class, but the things to look at are in App class and the file with the background process - the ServiceDelegate.

There seems to be a small CSS bug with text flow on this Forum when using Safari on iPad. In lack of a better place to report the bug, I post it here.

If you click: ‘Latest XX ago’ to go to the latest post in a tread, text flow is as attached screenshot. If you scroll to the top of page and then back to the bottom of page, the error goes away.

Already discussed here - Where to contact forums bug? - Garmin Connect Web - Mobile Apps & Web - Garmin Forums

Merging threads at this time.