Course Enrollment Links Breaking

  • 6 August 2021
  • 9 replies
  • 312 views

Hi, Docebo Community - 

I’m reaching out to see if any others have experienced issues with course enrollment links breaking/changing when sent via email or added to a Word document. 

One of our instructors sent an email with enrollment links for three different courses (set to allow anyone who clicks the link access to auto enroll). I verified with her that the links were the correct links, however, the links all broke/changed when the email arrived to the recipients so they got an error message when trying to access the course. She then tried to create a Word document with the proper enrollment links included and sent to me for review, but the links broke again in transit.

I’m at a loss for why this might be happening, so thought I’d reach out here for any advice!
 

Correct link:

Correct enrollment link before sending Word document

 

Broken link:

Broken link upon receiving Word document via email as an attachment

Thanks, 

Caitlin


9 replies

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Userlevel 7
Badge +7

Hi @Caitlin Leick the issue looks to be with Microsoft. You can see this sometimes when copying and pasting from Word into HTML. MS tends to add their own code around HTML which causes issues. 
 

also note that if you use sub domains you must be logged into the specific sub domain to generate the correct link otherwise users from other domains will get an error as well. 
 

have you tried using HTML only and not a word document? Or perhaps PDF might work better. 

Hi, @lrnlab - 

Thanks for your response! This is helpful. I will have her save as a PDF to see if that resolves the issue w/ the document. We also experienced this issue with links within the body of the Outlook email itself (if that’s what you mean by using HTML only outside of a Word document - apologies if I’m interpreting that wrong) both when sending emails from the platform and from Outlook. 

Good to know about subdomains - We don’t use them at the moment, but still helpful FFR.

Userlevel 7
Badge +7

@Caitlin Leick if using Docebo notifications there should be no issue if you use the short codes. I haven’t tried adding the course enrolment links though so I cannot speculate on that behaviour. 

@lrnlab Got it - Appreciate your thoughts! 

Userlevel 5
Badge +1

also note that if you use sub domains you must be logged into the specific sub domain to generate the correct link otherwise users from other domains will get an error as well. 

This is very important and was a hard lesson learned a couple of years ago when we first implemented. One of my colleagues, even after being told to stop using the root domain to login to the platform, just assumed there would be no problem in doing so. They then created a bunch of notifications and those notifications with dynamic links inserted resulted in recipients receiving links that had the root domain inserted instead of our branded domain. 

This is one, of many, reasons that we ditched multidomain. 

Userlevel 6
Badge +3

We have found that links for Docebo do not work directly from Word documents.  However, when we save that same document to PDF, the links work just fine.  So we just try to educate all employees to always PDF the file before sharing (typically our standard recommendation for any documents that are shared with clients, unless the document needs to be editable).

Userlevel 4
Badge

Thank you for posting this - I thought I was going crazy when a link would work and then when I used Word to create a campaign around the course with the link and sent it to our communications team it would not work.  I have had my issues with links and this was another frustration.  Glad for all the responses.  :-)

 

@sjennings78 Thank you, that is helpful! Links within PDFs do seem to work w/out issues. 

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