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The URL shortener situation is out of control

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Re: The URL shortener situation is out of control

#51

Post by bagels »

codyb wrote: post #14
userbinator wrote: post #11

This is propagated by people not really understanding URLs and blindly reposting links that have already been wrapped in a URL shortener through services that wrap them in another one. Whenever I repost links, I repost only the URL of the final page, stripping off anything unnecessary. Sadly, the trend of browsers hiding URLs or pieces of them is not helping the situation either. I don't think this can be solved tech…

Could a URL wrapper service follow a URL through its redirects only wrap the final address? I'm not a networking expert, but it seems viable enough to me. Shoot out a GET request, wrap the final address with your shortener. Cut out the middlemen. It's an idea. It might fail at scale. And might not be feasible.

Yes, you do a HEAD request, and follow the redirects till you stop getting redirected.

We do this to catch certain spam urls.

Re: The URL shortener situation is out of control

#53

Post by userbinator »

codyb wrote: post #14
userbinator wrote: post #11

This is propagated by people not really understanding URLs and blindly reposting links that have already been wrapped in a URL shortener through services that wrap them in another one. Whenever I repost links, I repost only the URL of the final page, stripping off anything unnecessary. Sadly, the trend of browsers hiding URLs or pieces of them is not helping the situation either. I don't think this can be solved tech…

Could a URL wrapper service follow a URL through its redirects only wrap the final address? I'm not a networking expert, but it seems viable enough to me. Shoot out a GET request, wrap the final address with your shortener. Cut out the middlemen. It's an idea. It might fail at scale. And might not be feasible.

A lot of shorteners don't just use regular HTTP redirects, they use Javascript or meta tags. To find the actual destination, the server would at the very least have to detect and parse HTML, and maybe even execute Javascript.

Re: The URL shortener situation is out of control

#54

Post by euank »

nostromo wrote: post #9

We could put a stop to marketing redirects tomorrow if we didn't allow redirects to set cookies. (Or perhaps only allowed a cookie if the redirect was served by the same domain as the target domain.)

This still doesn't stop all use-cases.

Click count statistics, time-clicked, and geo-information can all be gotten without any cookies. Some sites use url shorteners just to see clickthrough statistics, which can always be determined with no cookies etc.

Re: The URL shortener situation is out of control

#55

Post by porpoisemonkey »

nostromo wrote: post #9

We could put a stop to marketing redirects tomorrow if we didn't allow redirects to set cookies. (Or perhaps only allowed a cookie if the redirect was served by the same domain as the target domain.)

How would that affect the single sign-on case? AFAIK it's common practice to issue redirects to people who are not authenticated to send them to the identity provider's (IDP's) login page. This would make it hard for an IDP to determine if the user already has an active session with them.

Re: The URL shortener situation is out of control

#56

Post by Groxx »

mmahemoff wrote: post #18

That's really unfortunate. And it's not just performance, it really messes around with OS-level URL handling protocols like Android intents (and possibly FB's app links and iOS's new Extensibility). I recently found this happening with Twitter's Android app. The user sees a link to player.fm and thinks it will open the native Player FM app if they have it installed, since it's registered to handle that URL pattern. B…

For Android at least, I've been using this and I'm pretty happy with it: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.teaandtoys...

It usually works, and when it does it's nice to fix the idiotic Twitter-android-app behavior.

Re: The URL shortener situation is out of control

#57

Post by Eridrus »

narsil wrote: post #40
nostromo wrote: post #9

We could put a stop to marketing redirects tomorrow if we didn't allow redirects to set cookies. (Or perhaps only allowed a cookie if the redirect was served by the same domain as the target domain.)

This would result in marketers returning 200 responses to set the cookie and render a page with javascript that sets `window.location` instead, which would be even slower.

I think this is worth hammering home.

People want analytics information, and the only way we can do this now is by adding things like this. (Not strictly true, but ease of deployment, etc).

Unless you shut down the only way to do something, the people who want this service will work around whatever restrictions have been put in place, and the solution we get will probably be even uglier.

The real way to get rid of this is to provide a mechanism that addresses everyone's desires.

Re: The URL shortener situation is out of control

#59

Post by spinchange »

fiatjaf wrote: post #52

In a few years, all these services will be gone and all the links broken.

I get the link-rot concern (and 7 re-directs as showcased in the FA is absurd) but these are services are mostly used on twitter and social media where the life-span of a post sharing a link is hours to a day or so, at most.
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