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Non-Libyan URL Shortener

gadaf.fi

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Re: Non-Libyan URL Shortener

#51

Post by balac »

zackattack wrote: post #36
soult wrote: post #16

While it is a funny play on all those .ly domains and the fact that vb.ly got seized by the Libyan government, it is my opinion that yet another URL shortener is a stupid way of protest. Let me explain: I work with the Urlteam, a group of people that saves shorturl->longurl mappings for a bunch of shorteners. The typical life cycle of small shorteners is this: - URL shortener opens, gets some praise for weird feature…

How do spammers successfully abuse shorteners?

Obfuscating spam links. It is much harder to tell a fake/crappy url when it is hidden through a shortening service.

Re: Non-Libyan URL Shortener

#52

Post by dmor »

jschuur wrote: post #34

Slightly unrelated, but given the current sanctions, you can't renew a .ly domain name right now as a US business, correct? Bit.ly's domain name expires early next year, last time I checked.

do you have a source? i have some .ly domains to renew and have been considering what to do with them

Re: Non-Libyan URL Shortener

#53

Post by warp »

soult wrote: post #16

While it is a funny play on all those .ly domains and the fact that vb.ly got seized by the Libyan government, it is my opinion that yet another URL shortener is a stupid way of protest. Let me explain: I work with the Urlteam, a group of people that saves shorturl->longurl mappings for a bunch of shorteners. The typical life cycle of small shorteners is this: - URL shortener opens, gets some praise for weird feature…

That sounds like a useful thing to do. Does Urlteam have a website somewhere? A quick search didn't turn up much information.

Re: Non-Libyan URL Shortener

#54

Post by westicle »

I was simultaneously impressed by the clean, informative presentation and horrified by the assault of grammatical errors.

May I suggest having a native english-speaker review your copy? Otherwise nice site.

Re: Non-Libyan URL Shortener

#55

Post by wladimir »

soult wrote: post #16

While it is a funny play on all those .ly domains and the fact that vb.ly got seized by the Libyan government, it is my opinion that yet another URL shortener is a stupid way of protest. Let me explain: I work with the Urlteam, a group of people that saves shorturl->longurl mappings for a bunch of shorteners. The typical life cycle of small shorteners is this: - URL shortener opens, gets some praise for weird feature…

URL shorteners are evil. It's the digital equivalent of stepping into a car driven by a stranger, blindfolded. You don't know where you're going before you're there. It might not necessarily be a pleasant place.

Re: Non-Libyan URL Shortener

#56

Post by vog »

tlrobinson wrote: post #46
zackattack wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do spammers successfully abuse shorteners?

I don't know what the parent commenter had in mind, but perhaps bad spam filters don't follow redirects and bad link filters don't filter certain TLDs?

Why would a link filter want to filter whole TLDs? Shouldn't this be based at least on the domain name rather than discriminating whole countries by blocking their TLDs?

Re: Non-Libyan URL Shortener

#57

Post by vog »

prawn wrote: post #48
yuhong wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FYI, you can prevent new entries from being added to the shortener database without shutting down the shortener altogether.

Yes, that's true and I should've done that but I wanted to keep the service running quickly through that domain and bit.ly pro did that very easily, it "just" meant losing historical links. Easy to make the wrong decision when you, well-intentioned, set something up with no view to profiting from your time and then get slammed by spammers mercilessly, get no love from your host, etc. I don't know that I'd be the only…

> it "just" meant losing historical links.

Note that this in a bad idea in general, not just for URL shorteners but also for your personal website and even more for a project or company webseite.

There is a classic article by Tim Berners-Lee on that topic, written in 1998:

"Cool URIs don't change" (http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI)

Re: Non-Libyan URL Shortener

#58

Post by tlrobinson »

vog wrote: post #56
tlrobinson wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what the parent commenter had in mind, but perhaps bad spam filters don't follow redirects and bad link filters don't filter certain TLDs?

Why would a link filter want to filter whole TLDs? Shouldn't this be based at least on the domain name rather than discriminating whole countries by blocking their TLDs?

I don't know. I could imagine really stupid spam filters looking for strings matching /http:\/\/.*\.(com|net|org)/ or something. Of course that's no one else's fault but the filter.

Re: Non-Libyan URL Shortener

#59

Post by lloeki »

lutorm wrote: post #40
5l wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I'm not really up for a tedious discussion over semantics; my initial post was actually a genuine query because I have never seen it spelt otherwise than Gaddafi or Qaddafi. Evidently it's actually a linguistic can of worms. If I had to say, I guess correct would be the closest phonetic spelling to the Arabic, and as I understand that would be Gaddafi (in Libya) or Qaddafi (more generally). Or you could use wha…

Since it is phonetic, it will differ from country to country since different languages map differently to phonemes.

Exactly, in France the most common form is Kadhafi
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