Any idea why cards emailed to board are now having formatting characters (such as *) escaped out?

[Ramanuj Basu]

For years, I've been using a Wufoo form to help my team add story ideas to our content board. Part of that involved formatting the Wufoo output in such a way that the considerable content from that form came into the card with formatting characters in place, to make the back of the card easier to read.

For maybe a month or so now (I lose track), those formatting characters have been automatically escaped out with the backslash character, so the created card descriptions are much harder to skim.

EXAMPLE

Previously, this text came in as is to the back of the card:

**Who are you?** *

Robert

The double asterisks caused the "Who are you?" text to be bold (followed by the obligatory * to indicated a required field on the Wufoo form). Now, though, that same text is coming into cards this way:

\*\*Who are you?\*\* *

Robert

The backslashes make the asterisks intended to delineate bold text appear, instead, as is.

I certainly didn't change anything in my Wufoo form, and Wufoo hasn't changed anything in the way these emails get sent out (I know because I receive the emails in my inbox as well), so I'm assuming that Trello has changed in some way, but I can't find any documentation about this online.

I'm hoping someone can help me understand what's going on here and, hopefully, turn this new "feature" off.

TIA

[Henrique Godinho]

Hello there,

Im experiencing a similar issue using Google Forms. 

The problem resides on how the accents are showing on card.

We are experinging this issue for about a month, nothing has changed at the form.

You can see that the title of the card is correct, but not the content.

[Matt Dolan]

Hi! I'm Matt, an engineer here at Trello.

Having looked further into this issue, I've identified the cause. The backslashes are already present in the email Trello receives from WuFoo. Trello is faithfully replicating the data we receive.

The reason you don't see this when you look at the email in your inbox is that the email WuFoo sends has the content twice — once as Markdown (which Trello uses, and contains the backslashes) and once as HTML. Your email client displays the HTML, which all looks fine.

If you're interested and you have a ‘Show Original’ or ‘View Source’ option in your email client, you can see the raw email WuFoo sends, with these two copies of the data — once as HTML and once as Markdown.

To resolve the problem, you'll need to get in contact with WuFoo to get their help to remove the backslashes from the emails they send.

All the best getting it fixed!

[IFI Media Dept]

Personally, I am using Gravity Forms, not WuFoo. I will contact Gravity Forms support to see what they say.

[IFI Media Dept]

Hi Matt, wanted to follow up with you here. In our case (using Gravity Forms to send emails to Trello) we did some testing and found that the backslashes were not present in the email Trello received from Gravity Forms.

We saw that Gravity Forms was sending an HTML email (not plain text). We made a change to force Gravity Forms to send these emails as plain text and it fixed the issue.

We are wondering if there is an issue on Trello's side when an HTML email that contains markdown is received?

[Matt Dolan]

Hi. Any system that's processing text will depend on the format that the text is declared to be in, so it can handle it appropriately according to the syntax rules for each.

If an email's content is marked as HTML, Trello will treat it as such, and won't try to parse it as Markdown. Otherwise, it would produce undesired output in most cases (it's generally best for systems not to guess the intention behind the input).

So long as the email content is appropriate marked (i.e. has the correct content-type stated) as plain text or Markdown, it should be correctly processed.

I'm glad you managed to fix your issue, and thanks for the update here for others to benefit from.

[Garrett]

Sorry to hear about the trouble here @Ramanuj Basu 

I'd like to try and reproduce this issue on my end. Would you mind sharing a screenshot of how the card's description looks now, and how you expect it to look please?

[IFI Media Dept]

Like the previous author, I'd like the backslashes to go away so that the markdown works for formatting bold text.

[Garrett]

Hey Ramanuj,

Sorry for the delay. Hrmm that's very interesting. I can't really say for sure why the backslashes are suddenly being added to your card description, but that would explain why the formatting is not working.

Currently, backslashes are used to escape the markdown formatting, so formatting characters like asterisks will be displayed literally, as you've found!

Would you mind reaching out to us at support@trello.com so we can have a closer look at the Wufoo form as well please?

[Ramanuj Basu]

Thanks, Garrett. Will do.

[Michael Caufman]

FYI - I have this problem as well (seemingly for the past 6 or 7 months). One week it is FINE, then the next 3 or 4 weeks have issues. - Right now it is an issue,  I have cards from 9/30/19 that are FINE....anything in the past 2 weeks is not.

I get the "\" between all my formatting if I look at EDITING the description

gh

[Michael Caufman]

Assuming something was 'fixed' on this at 11/1/19....(after 5pm EST).

I have cards entered via email 11/1/19 at 3;53 PM EST that had the 'escaped' formatting....everything after that seems OK now....

[Michael Caufman]

Sorry, I was premature with this...

The problem reamains.

I had a window of 5PM to 5:18 PM on 11/1/19 where cards were fine. Now they are back to the ecscaped formatting....