Links to interesting iNat observations from an Excel worksheet can no longer be opened. This is very annoying – has anything changed on the iNat side? If I paste the same link into an Outlook mail, it still works, so it’s not a general MS issue.

I’ll consider everything - to find the least cumbersome way …

Odd, I did the same with that and a handful of other links in Excel and all of them opened just fine. Running: Office Home 2024 Windows 10

Office 2021, 2024, and any of the 365 or cloud versions are going to use more modern bits to do web-related stuff. I think any version prior to 2021 will use the old (Trident) Internet Explorer engine to do stuff related to the web. i think this is true when deciding what to do with a URL, even if i…

I think the issue only occurs with older versions of Excel. I have an ancient version (MS Office 2010) on my old desktop at home and run into the same error when trying to open links. This is somewhat recent - it used to work fine but not any more. I’m not sure about the exact date when it changed. …

What I wanted to write first (after some further testing): I don’t believe in miracles, so my final conclusions for now: - there must have been a change in March - it cannot come from an old Excel program - since only https://www.inaturalist.org is affected (and not even https://forum.inaturalis…

[image] miwi2020: the problem suddenly disappeared it could be related to https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/social-media-previews-no-longer-work/77159/2 .

Is there anywhere where this bot check is announced or discussed? I have searched for, but haven’t found anything about it other than this mention here. I think this may be what is affecting me in the other thread (that you replied to.) I would like to know if there is any way other than using the …

@pisum is correct that the fix we rolled out for the social media previews seems to have resolved this issue as well. So we made a change, and that also resolved this issue – to me that suggests the fix should be fairly durable. That said, we can’t guarantee 2013-era software will continue to work w…

There are all kinds of bots that crawl websites. Some bots can help websites, and some bots can harm websites. Software developers in charge of keeping sites up and running have to find way to prevent bad bot traffic from slowing down, completely crashing, and/or hacking their sites. One option so…

[image] miwi2020: The used Excel version is quite old (2013), but did work properly all the time. Stop using that software immediately. It’s that simple. Why? It’s a huge security risk. It has not been patched for a very significant period and there are dozens of active exploits out there now…

Links to iNat obs. don't work anymore

General

pisum March 30, 2026, 2:36pm 23

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Links to iNat obs. don't work anymore

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