Setting up the account to try this for our small team, we're running everything on different spreadsheets, pulling different sheets has been "hey X, can you get me the sheet url for Y again".
Thanks for the startup friendly pricing model, keep up the great work!
Launch HN: GoLinks (YC W19) – Internal short links for teams
41–50 of 97 posts
Re: Launch HN: GoLinks (YC W19) – Internal short links for teams
#42I 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 re…
My understanding of the first concern was that users are in trouble if GoLinks shuts down or has an outage. Do you have any mitigation plan for such cases?
Re: Launch HN: GoLinks (YC W19) – Internal short links for teams
#43If 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”.
I think Facebook's "bunny" system is also open source, but I have no idea how easy it is to set up.
Re: Launch HN: GoLinks (YC W19) – Internal short links for teams
#44We are distinctly not allowed to use URL shorteners at my enterprise company and our fraud prevention department regularly educates us about the dangers of clicking URL-shortened links (you have no idea if it will send you to a phishing site or not). URL shortening was created so people could send tweets without using up their character counts on a URL. I'm pretty sure most software companies aren't communicating via…
It's less of a link shortener and more of a link manager for companies. The concern that companies have with URL shorteners is they can't manage who is creating these links, and who owns these links. With GoLinks, the company will own the links, they can manage, edit, update, delete any links within the organization, so they will be centralized. The added benefit is that with a memorable link, you can access go/benef…
The issue is that you obfuscate the destination of the link. This is a big no-no in enterprise fraud prevention. We train people to only click trusted links. How do I know whether a golink is trusted or not? And what if my golinks account is compromised and all my links get redirected to phising sites? All of this huge risk so... people can remember the link?
Re: Launch HN: GoLinks (YC W19) – Internal short links for teams
#45Personally, 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. 1. https://go.eligrey.com/zerodrop
Always happy to see go links being used at other companies! You can actually take this a step further at Eligrey. By setting up a DNS Entry that redirects go.eligrey.com to the domain go you would then allow your links to become conversational and even quicker to access. For example you could say "Checkout go slash zerodrop" without physically sending an email or message.
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Re: Launch HN: GoLinks (YC W19) – Internal short links for teams
#46Curious about the pricing. It says $2.75 / month / user but it also says unlimited users. Does that mean you can pay $2.75 / month / user for as many users as you want? Seems confusing and I'd assume it's unlimited users if I'm paying per seat.
Can everyone in the company use the go links but only paid users can create them?
Re: Launch HN: GoLinks (YC W19) – Internal short links for teams
#47Anecdote, you've done some Facebook ad targeting to Google employees. Clever. One of the ads in the Seattle area has a meet and greet of Google employees in the comment section haha.
Re: Launch HN: GoLinks (YC W19) – Internal short links for teams
#48It 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?
The browser extension is how you we're able to get "go/" links working in your browser without having any kind of network infrastructure. We have other integration options without the extension but its the recommended approach. https://www.golinks.io/support.php#technical
I think the question is why the extension needs that particular permission.
Re: Launch HN: GoLinks (YC W19) – Internal short links for teams
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
The extension will read the text on screen to determine if there are any golinks so that it can change it to a click-through link. We know this may sound scary but rest assure that we do not have any ability to see or save any content. Your privacy is our top concern.
Correct me if I am wrong but if I visit my tax account page or something where the ssn is displayed - you can see it too?
If you load a page with your SSN, the full page will probably be parsed by the extension in search of a "GoLink". Honestly, that's pretty unavoidable. The parser most likely needs to read every byte on the page to see if its part of a GoLink, and that includes the segment of bytes that includes your SSN.
Any ad-blocker or otherwise page-modifying Chrome Extension requires the same permissions and likely does the same thing.
Provided the GoLinks extension isn't phoning home with the full contents of the pages its parsing, and immediately discards non-GoLink related data, this shouldn't be a problem.
It would be nice if the GoLinks team could clarify exactly what data is sent back to their servers by the Chrome Extension.
Chrome Extensions can also be inspected and their network traffic can be sniffed quite easily, so independent auditing is possible as well.
Re: Launch HN: GoLinks (YC W19) – Internal short links for teams
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
I don't think this is correct. The extension identifies GoLinks embedded in other websites (like internal knowledge bases or emails, I presume) and converts them to a link to the destination.