8

For the most part, URL shorteners should not be used here.

Their primary benefit—fitting long URLs into artificially scarce text spaces—is of no use here. The Question and Answer spaces are plenty large enough to handle 99.99% of all URLs. Even the comment space is plenty big enough for most.

On the downside, however, URL shorteners can be (and have been) used to hide:

  • spam
  • links with affiliate codes
  • malware
  • LMGTFY

Almost all URL shorteners should be fixed to be their target URL. The following links are to searches on the main site to find posts with these URL shorteners in them.

(Please add more as necessary.)

Note that URL shorteners in comments aren't findable this way.

Note also that some instances should stay. Explaining how to use an URL shortener, for instance, is okay. Use your best judgment.

As with all clean-up projects, don't just fix this one issue. More than likely there are other issues with the post that should be addressed.

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  • Alright, then. Good job everybody. If you see other URL shorteners in use, add them here. Let's revisit this again in a month. – ale Sep 17 '13 at 20:14
  • I have seen the shortener sl.ge on other sites but not (yet) on this one. – Chenmunka Sep 23 '13 at 14:17
  • @Chenmunka: Never heard of it and I can't find any information on it. Got a link? – ale Sep 23 '13 at 14:26
  • I've done a bit of hunting. It seems to be proprietary to a certain US company connected with Thomas Edison. So it may not be worth worrying about. Sorry if I have muddied the waters. – Chenmunka Sep 23 '13 at 16:40
  • Should paid URL shorteners like yass-link.com and adf.ly be in the list was well? – Zackary supports Monica Oct 12 '18 at 1:07

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