Tiny URL, etc

[yg17]

May I suggest a rule prohibiting the use of tinyurl.com and similar sites for links posted in posts? There's no need for it. This isn't Twitter and there's no character limit. There is no easy way to verify what the link actually is without clicking on it. You can't verify if it's a legit site or not just by looking at the URL, which is especially frustrating for those of us who browse the forums at work and don't know if we're clicking a link to a legit site like apple.com or to a porn site.

**************************'s domain (l m g t f y.com without the spaces) is censored in the forums, resulting in http://www.*********** when it's in a post. Could the admins do the same for tinyurl.com, bit.ly, etc?

 

[kainjow]

They are nice for signatures though since there are character limits there. I'm not sure if vB can choose to not filter things in sigs.

 

[bartelby]

**************************'s domain (l m g t f y.com without the spaces) is censored in the forums, resulting in http://www.*********** when it's in a post. Could the admins do the same for tinyurl.com, bit.ly, etc?

Fits nicely with your sig.

 

[cube]

I don't like those links, as well as the ones inserted by the forum.

 

[yg17]

Fits nicely with your sig.

Requiring posters to post real URLs instead of diguised ones that can link to anything doesn't count as censorship

 

[bartelby]

Requiring posters to post real URLs instead of diguised ones that can link to anything doesn't count as censorship

I know, hence the

It's just you were saying you'd like the tiny urls censored...

 

[SilentPanda]

I don't personally disagree with your sentiment but I think one issue with shorteners/morphers is that there are so many of them. Certainly there are more mainstream ones but it'd be fairly easy to find one that was no blocked. It might be nice though if vbulletin had a plugin to unshorten when people submit the post. Of course that has the same issue with their being a lot of shorteners too.

 

[angelwatt]

I use a Firefox addon to reveal the true destination for some of those services (80 of them). It works pretty well. I don't click on a link when I can't verify its destination.

Long URL Please

 

[jampat]

A lot of long URL's get busted up when you try to post the original. I have switched to using Tiny URL as it always works, where posting the original only works some of the time. I find broken links much more annoying that Tiny URL.

 

[localoid]

Why is there a need for TinyURL when the "insert link" function can be used (or added manually by using the appropriate vB code) to shorten an extremely long URL to any desired length, from 1 character in length to any number of characters of words you'd like to use? One can simply hover over the link and full URL can be viewed in your browser's status bar...