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Launch HN: GoLinks (YC W19) – Internal short links for teams
21–30 of 97 posts
Re: Launch HN: GoLinks (YC W19) – Internal short links for teams
#22If you want a simple (but bare-bones) self-hosted version of this service, check out the open source version I made a couple years back: https://github.com/Detry322/redisred Here’s a hubot plugin for slack: https://github.com/Detry322/hubot-redisred We use this extensively at MIT for HackMIT and the MIT Pokerbots competition, and best of all, it’s free. The deploy to Heroku button should “just work”.
Awesome work! We love to see go link enthusiasts!
There are a ton of good open source golinks systems out there, we just want to give users a full suite of golinks with zero setup :)
Re: Launch HN: GoLinks (YC W19) – Internal short links for teams
#23I think our company has a policy against using shortened URLs, namely because: - If the company goes out of business, then our documentation and business logs have a lot of dead, useless links that can't be fixed after the fact. If it's a business critical use case, then you just shot yourself in the foot. - Related to the above, it's not human-parseable. If you're on a mailing list and you send out a hyperlink, you…
To address the first concern, anyone in the company can modify any link, so they will never go stale. We do this to solve that exact problem where documentation may contain dead links. With GoLinks your links will always be up to date as long as people are using them. Your company is the owner of the links, not an individual.
The second, our links are actually more human-parsable. go/customer-feedback is much more readable than https://docs.google.com/d/document/ABCDE1234/. You actually wouldn't know if the google doc is relevant without opening it. This might be surprising, but many companies with a similar system actually don't maintain them very well. It works the first time when a tools team builds it, but when those engineers leave the company, new engineers will either try to revive the old system, or rewrite the entire system from scratch to maintain it. We continue to improve the product over time with customer feedback and can provide analytics for the most common links used in the company.
There currently isn't a solution specifically solving these issue on the market today.
Hope this helps!
Re: Launch HN: GoLinks (YC W19) – Internal short links for teams
#24If you want a simple (but bare-bones) self-hosted version of this service, check out the open source version I made a couple years back: https://github.com/Detry322/redisred Here’s a hubot plugin for slack: https://github.com/Detry322/hubot-redisred We use this extensively at MIT for HackMIT and the MIT Pokerbots competition, and best of all, it’s free. The deploy to Heroku button should “just work”.
https://github.com/kellegous/go as well
Re: Launch HN: GoLinks (YC W19) – Internal short links for teams
#25It asks me to install a browser extension, which asks for this permission: "It can: Read and change all your data on the websites you visit". Is it normal?
It's not normal and shouldn't be allowed to become some dystopian new normal.
This is definitely a real concern, and we're actually exploring the Chrome permissions to see if it's possible to redirect your traffic, without requiring the "Read all data" permission, because you're right, that shouldn't be the norm.
Re: Launch HN: GoLinks (YC W19) – Internal short links for teams
#26It would be great if you could create a separate links page for individual teams within an organization. The most important and most complicated links at my work tend to be specific to my team, and are not relevant to the rest of the company. Unless I'm using the product wrong...
Thanks for that feedback! We've actually been hearing that from multiple users and have added the feature to our backlog.
That's great. Thanks for letting me know
Re: Launch HN: GoLinks (YC W19) – Internal short links for teams
#27It asks me to install a browser extension, which asks for this permission: "It can: Read and change all your data on the websites you visit". Is it normal?
It's not normal and shouldn't be allowed to become some dystopian new normal.
If it's found to be grabbing more data than it should, people can report them and the extension can be banned from the Chrome Web Store.
It's not ideal but in order to make utilities that work on every page, these permissions are needed.
The code inside the extension bundle (.crx) would need to contain the potential for abuse, and if it gets popular enough, security researchers will look at it. Even if it's not popular, incentives will be at work, because it would be a foolish risk for a company to ship code that could expose a user's entire browser history into the extension, because at any point someone could take a look at the bundle and find the flaw.
Re: Launch HN: GoLinks (YC W19) – Internal short links for teams
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not normal and shouldn't be allowed to become some dystopian new normal.
This is definitely a real concern, and we're actually exploring the Chrome permissions to see if it's possible to redirect your traffic, without requiring the "Read all data" permission, because you're right, that shouldn't be the norm.
The permission would need to ask for "your data on go" rather than "your data on golinks.io". I'm not certain that the "your data on golinks.io" would cover it but I think it would.
IMO this permission is something that Chrome should explore, along with other fine-grained permissions. It might be worth making a bug report to Chromium so you can link it when people ask why you ask for such broad permissions. I think the bug report should probably mention that Google uses go links :)
Re: Launch HN: GoLinks (YC W19) – Internal short links for teams
#29Personally, at my company we just use a private link redirecter at go.company-name.example. We use a modified version of the open source Zerodrop webapp[1].
This solution doesn't require a browser extension with elevated permissions that increases your attack surface.
Re: Launch HN: GoLinks (YC W19) – Internal short links for teams
#30Don't domains managed by Microsoft Active Directory do the same thing? E.g. If git is hosted on git.contoso.com and my workstation is part of contoso.com, I can just go to https://git