Changes to way Velocity script works in Preview mode

[Jon_Wright]

Hi

Just wondering if anybody else has noticed some changes to way Velocity script renders emails in preview mode:

1. It seems to display a 'default' version of the email even when no contact has been selected in the preview, I'm sure it used to only render when a person was selected in the 'View by'?

2. Links no longer seem to work in preview, instead they render as something like this:

https://email.tmforum.org/dc/$mktEncrypt.encrypt($mkturl14)/MDIxLVdMRC04MTUAAAGHPV5xMEcUVFkngDzWkkpv...

(note this is when outputting multiple tracked links as per: https://blog.teknkl.com/multiple-marketo-tracked-links-in-velocity/)

Links still work when sending a test or live email

AFAIK all of our scripting tokens still work in live emails but just wondered if something has changed that we need to be aware of.

Thanks

Jon

[SanfordWhiteman]

I see  #2 (and have had other reports of it) but not #1.

Re: #1, the {{my.token}} placeholders are still shown.

[JaredKimball]

Yep,

We are seeing #2 in both of our Marketo instances. 

I filed a support ticket last week because without the ability to preview and test links in Preview Mode we have to send ourselves over 50 emails to test the links across the 50 different brands we are using for our emails which all require unique links by brand.

This was their reply this morning to my ticket:

"Based on what the current application offers, it can't accept certain characters when it is in preview mode.

Characters which are not accepted are "#", unbalanced brackets " {" or "} " or unencoded dollar sign "$" will make the link broken if you include token in the link.

Hope this helps. Please do let me know if you have any questions."

We've used tokens in our links for 5+ years which use {{token}} in every link. Something changed overnight and causing my marketing team a lot of QA headaches because of this change.