Build It: URL Shortener | Hacker News Reader

Build It: URL Shortener

codular.com

17 pointswrighty5211 comments

Does anyone else feel that the decision to implement of a URL shortener shouldn't be taken so lightly? I mean, when you decide to take your URL shortening service down, all those links your service generated are effectively dead. There's no way to figure out where they pointed at.

I would guess that this is aimed more at people who are creating their own 'vanity' url shorteners for their own use than those creating services to compete with Bitly (or Google's).

Right, that makes sense and is probably accurate, but all the links they share on Twitter and Facebook and Hacker News are going to stop working once these people stops running their link resolvers.

This is awesome, when I was building the refer.ly shortener I read through dozens of tutorials looking for different approaches and best practices -- this is the easiest to understand step-by-step guide I've seen so far. I'll definitely save it for reference

Just dont put it live, main challenge to check if link doesn't go to porn or even something worse. Because YOU are responsible for content you are redirecting.

>Because YOU are responsible for content you are redirecting.

Are you?

Absolutely not - there's no reason you can't implement black listing or whatever. I can guarantee that there are URL shorteners out there that redirect to porn.

Your hosting provider will hold you responsible. If they keep getting abuse reports because spammers use you URL shortener in their e-mails. Hosting providers (including dedicated servers) do not want to be blacklisted by popular spam lists.

In some jurisdictions you have to fight hard to prove you are not if it comes to anything. That fight could be costly.

It isn't the porn content that is the problem. Not "mainstream" or "normal" porn anyway.

If you end up being the conduit for something worse (everything thing from malware that just plays ads to people, through to malware with more damaging intent, up to the far more objectionable porn and other things that you might have trouble squaring with your conscience even if it isn't your fault (because you did everything you thought necessary to make sure that didn't happen).

If you setup an anonymous redirector, don't just put it out there. You need to monitor it for some of the worst things it could be used for. If not for legal reasons, then because you don't want to make things easier for certain sorts of people to hide.

(I'm not saying don't set one up, feel free if you think you can monitor it to your own satisfaction, just be careful with it, and at very least make sure it is very easy to report links to questionable content to you so you can nip them in the bud ASAP)

The longer the URL, the bigger the benefit of using your service, the greater the chance it will break. URLs might be too long for a varchar(255) field!

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