EXCEL 2016 - Hyperlink Unusual behaviour

Please provide the entire actual URL that you are getting an error on. I assume this URL is a public site and no login is required. Given the fact that this just started yesterday and it's only one site, it is almost certainly something they changed on the site rather than something in Excel. It may be that the site detects this as a bot.

Are you using the HYPERLINK function or do you have the link configured for the cell?

Thanks for the reply.
so that this text doesn't recognise the URL I as I don't have enough posts yet, I'll space it out.

The real address is;
https://www.discogs.com/

to get to this via excel, I have this function in the cell
=HYPERLINK(CONCATENATE("https://www.discogs.com/search/?q=",A1),"Link")

where A1 contains artist and track name, e.g. "depeche mode enjoy the silence"

this search works from word and powerpoint of which both are in the same office pack pro(2016), just not excel.

no login is needed to search, anyone can use this search query.
Thank you

I don't have the solution yet but I am able to reproduce this problem on Excel 365. I'll see what I can find out.

I still don't know what the problem is but I built a web page to capture the HTTP header and here is what I found. The only difference I see is that in Excel, the cookies are not sent. They are sent in the browser and also in Word. The cookie is not something I configured myself and may be part of my web host's default environment to support visitor statistics.

The only possibility I can think of is that discogs.com also has cookies and if you send a header without the cookies it won't accept it. Since this is the only site where you have this problem, I would contact them for tech support and ask if they require cookies in the header.

Excel using Chrome as the default browser:

Host: [redacted].com
Connection: keep-alive
Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/89.0.4389.128 Safari/537.36
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8,application/signed-exchange;v=b3;q=0.9
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.9
Content-Length: 0

Directly in Chrome:

Host: [redacted].com
Connection: keep-alive
Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/89.0.4389.128 Safari/537.36
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8,application/signed-exchange;v=b3;q=0.9
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.9
Cookie: _tccl_visitor=24e2b377-5391-4465-b87d-079605606a05; _tccl_visit=24e2b377-5391-4465-b87d-079605606a05
Content-Length: 0

Excel using Edge as the default browser:

Host: [redacted].com
Connection: keep-alive
Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/90.0.4430.72 Safari/537.36 Edg/90.0.818.39
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8,application/signed-exchange;v=b3;q=0.9
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.9
Content-Length: 0

Directly in Edge:

Host: [redacted].com
Connection: keep-alive
Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/90.0.4430.72 Safari/537.36 Edg/90.0.818.39
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8,application/signed-exchange;v=b3;q=0.9
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.9
Cookie: _tccl_visitor=24e2b3a8-4050-4b6b-81a4-03632411aa59; _tccl_visit=24e2b3a8-4050-4b6b-81a4-03632411aa59
Content-Length: 0

Microsoft Word using Chrome as the default browser:

Host: www.[redacted].com
Connection: keep-alive
Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/89.0.4389.128 Safari/537.36
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8,application/signed-exchange;v=b3;q=0.9
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.9
Cookie: _tccl_visitor=23c75b05-4955-44cf-888f-021557070fe8; PHPSESSID=b48ef90014554bd0ed02e2dccc191ef7
Content-Length: 0

Edge is not the issue. I had the same behavior using Edge and Chrome. I am certain that this is some configuration at the discogs.com server. It may be a deliberate attempt to prohibit bots from doing searches to limit traffic. Or it could be that they made a change that had an unintended side effect.

I also did a test with curl, and got

308 Permanent Redirect

The response is a 308 error which indicates that the site is no longer at that URL. This pretty much clinches my theory that they require cookies. You may have noticed that when you first enter the site there is a prompt at the bottom asking you to accept cookies. They probably made a change over the weekend. Europe requires this notification and I think a lot of U.S. sites are adopting it to be compliant.

I think the way that Excel links work is that it directly sends the HTTP request to the site and then Windows delegates the response to the default web browser. Excel is not asking Edge to send the request on its behalf, and Excel doesn't have cookies. Excel makes a request without cookies and the site doesn't like it so they send back a 308. I don't know the internals of Office and Windows but that model is consistent with everything I'm seeing. Which is to say, it doesn't matter what you do in Edge--clear cache, login, accept cookies, stand on your head--the Excel request won't work.

Word may work differently, and may indeed ask Edge to send the request, in which case the cookies are sent.

I am skeptical (sorry, sceptical), but it's possible. When an agent doesn't know what to do they tell you to reboot and then if that doesn't work, reinstall. I have seen a couple of weird problems solved by a reinstallation but in this case I'm pretty sure I understand the cause since I could reproduce it with curl.

Well, I don't know how that's possible.

A workaround is possible using VBA. There are two ways to do it. The easy way IMHO is to use Internet Explorer, because there is an object available for it in VBA. It would also be possible to do it in Edge but that involved sending keyboard commands to the Edge window, which I have not done before. I will create a prototype to determine feasibility.

Originally Posted by Squaregame

Same problem here

Do you mean you have hyperlinks in Excel to discogs.com that are not working?

Edit: Disregard, Squaregame has been banned for spam.