If you simply embedded links into your comments, those should come over unchanged, since they're just part of the comments - the jAlbum core doesn't know that there's anything unusual about them.

But if you were using MatrixSlide's ability to plant link buttons in the caption, that's a different kettle of fish. Those are unique to the skin, and the core doesn't know they're there at all.

How many of these are we talking about? If it's a relatively small number, you could just display the source code of the finished pages and do some copying and pasting. Otherwise, it will take a custom-written tool to extract those external links (URL, button text, and button tooltip) and append them to the comments.

At the end of the day, you still won't get the old link buttons without some additional finagling. Instead, you would just get simple text links in the comment. I resisted including things like that in Saturn. I had seen too many albums that ended up looking like link farms that, oh by the way, had a few small images.

Post back if it proves to be too much of a hassle, or if you run into problems. I've written tools like this before, and it's not wildly difficult.

Alas, it would probably take longer to develop and test a tool to automate this than it would take just to harvest the URL's and manually paste them into the comments.

No, it's not special characters. The problem is much more obscure than that, but I actually have a little note to myself about it in my skin development stuff, because when you run into it, it puzzles the daylights out of you for a while.

In short, that link that you're planting in the comment is being grabbed by the Floatbox script that's running on the page. It thinks it's something it's supposed to open in a new lightbox. So instead of going to a new page, you're staying on the same page, but all of the navigation for the regular images in the project gets very confused.

I think the fix is just to tell Floatbox that it shouldn't touch this link, and there's an easy way to do that. Instead of entering this in your comment:

<a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=listcode" target="_blank">Click here</a>

Try this, instead:

<a class="nofloatbox" href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=listcode" target="_blank">Click here</a>

This is why I write myself little notes about weird stuff.