Hyperlinks not visible on private messages

Thank you @Julian - this is helpful and we’ll test it out.

R.e. 

 I personally would recommend to include general user onboarding information rather in the “Welcome to the community” notification and not send a private message directly after registration (if this is what you were planning to do). The reason is that the user would receive two notifications at the same time (for the private message and for the completed registration). I think it is more elegant to have all general info in that email, and then send any additional / specific information in a rank pm. 

This came up during our EBR with @omika.mali and @Shane1 (that we had this PM to new users feature disabled and it could help).  We do have a thorough welcome email.  We were also wondering if that gets duplicative to have two messages to new users, although the PM could come from our community manager and be somewhat more personalized.

Overall, we are trying to optimize around more new users asking a first question / starting a topic. Our base usage and more advanced usage is quite good.  Thanks and @Dorothyt r.e. HTML tip!

Personally, I’m very much in favour of sending out the automated private message to newly registered members. When someone goes through the registration flow and lands back on the community homepage, that is when the welcome email is sent. So in my opinion most users are not going to go back and check their email before browsing the community first. Many will probably only read that welcome email at a later time after completing their first session on the community.

So that’s why the automated private message for new registrants offers a lot of value. As soon as they finish the registration flow they will notice they have a private message in the top right-hand corner which they’re likely to click into right away, which welcomes them to the community can point them to a helpful resource and have a call to action encouraging them to post for the first time.

 @Julian I had actually deleted the space in the URL and its in our UAT under the ‘New User - Bit rank.’  I assigned this rank by 2nd role to attempt to test and can not get this email to even send.

And when I just test it in a PM directly it does not honor the URLs. So I’m still not able to make this URL in PMs work. 
Can you provide some sample text that you know DOES work? 

Thanks for the update! I will have a look and add a working example to your staging environment tonight.