I'm calling this a bug, because I see no reason why one would want to do a tsv, csv or Excel download of user log reports that include hyperlinks to the original user profiles or course activities.

I just upgraded an instance of Moodle to 2.8 .... (Moodle 2.8.2+ (Build: 20150115)). Creating monthly reports of user log access in plain English is needed by my employer.

When I do a download of Moodle participation to a tab delimited or csv file, I now get hyperlinks embedded in the entries (where they never occurred at least prior to Moodle 2.7), thus rendering the import into Excel (via tsv) useless to me. Downloading as an Excel file does not work for me (may be a Mac issue, not sure). This has materialized with the new standard log reporting method.

Never had this issue in 2.6 using the now-termed legacy log. Can it be fixed to do a download without the hyperlink info?

Only what appears in the red boxes (in the following link) is what used to be downloaded and imported into Excel, not the whole lines, including the embedded hyperlinks.
https://moodle.org/pluginfile.php/143/mod_forum/attachment/1200455/logs.jpg

Perhaps an option on downloading the log file reports could include a checkbox to include hyperlinks or not.

In the interim, is there a manual way to hack the code on my end so that the html code can be stripped from the tsv or csv downloads?