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A large reason of why URL shorteners are hard to maintain is the incredible amount of spam they receive. At Slicehost we seem to get spamcop emails every day ab
by superjared 17y ago
A large reason of why URL shorteners are hard to maintain is the incredible amount of spam they receive. At Slicehost we seem to get spamcop emails every day about yet another URL shortener someone has created because the spammers will use their link instead of the real URL.
- pg 17y agoMost url shorteners are banned on HN (in the sense that stories using them are autokilled) for that reason.
- ivankirigin 17y agoYou could auto-lengthen the URLs. Twitter has a useful tool for this, e.g. http://search.twitter.com/hugeurl?url=http%3A%2F%2Ftinyurl.com%2F5rw4zb http://search.twitter.com/hugeurl?url=http%3A%2F%2Ftinyurl.c...
- trezor 17y agoOr you could simply not use stupid URL shorteners which have absolutely no purpose anywhere on the internet. That one website (twitter) has a post limit of 140 characters doesn't mean we should spread the stupidity to everywhere else.
- ivankirigin 17y agoI get a lot of value from bitly's analytics. Also, with their pushing clients like AIR apps, iphone apps, and email readers to include referrers, your site's analytics are going to get a lot better. URL shortening done wrong sucks. Don't use anything besides those that are really serious. Right now, bitly is the best option.
- trezor 17y agoIf you want analysis. why not use one of the numerous proven tools out there already, designed for this specificly? Not trolling. This is a serious question.
- ivankirigin 17y agoWhat other tools can show you how a link spreads through a social network? That's why it is valuable - it is like analytics that Twitter / facebook etc have but don't expose
- rythie 17y agoSurely freezing the service so that no new urls could be summited would solve that problem but still keep the links alive.