On Thu, Apr 21, 2016 at 09:14:42PM +0200, Michael Scherer wrote:
On Wed, Apr 20, 2016 at 03:57:57PM -0600, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
Greetings.
I thought I would start a bit of discussion on url shorteners.
In the past we had paste.fedoraproject.org output a short url for every paste using the 'ur1.ca' service. ur1.ca is nice because they are 100% open source. However, at some point they became very slow, so the command line 'fpaste' tool would take a long time and then eventually timeout. So, we disabled that and haven't been doing any short urls for pastes.
There are however some places where people have requested we use url shorteners over the years:
The mailman3 archived-at header link (which is a link to the hyperkitty archive of a specific post). It's long and ugly like: http://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/infrastructure@lists.fedoraproj...
Short redirects to LiveCD images (including spins)
This could apply to any of the common media we point people to.
fpaste using ur1.ca. (The use case here is if you have a machine barely on the net so you can use the fpaste command to paste something, but need to retype that url into another computer to get someone else to help you look at it, the short url is much easier to type.
- Other service that uses urls that might be nice to shorten for some reason. I'm sure we could think of more places they might be handy.
So, options:
- Just punt and keep going the way we are. We have lived without them
this long.
I would point 2 things:
- URL shorteners may not have a long enough life for some use case.
While I do not care about longevity of a paste I use on irc for being helped, it would be more annoying losing the url of a permanent document if someone use that on a webpage or a email.
- URL shortener tend to be abused a bit by spammer/malware, and
some mail providers (like Google) do block mail with some url shortner, or too much url shortener (for example, goog.le). It caused a few headaches for me on ovirt.org ml.
So I think url shortener is fine for fpaste and redirect to livecd (because they are shortlived and/or people can find them with context anyway), a bit less for hyperkitty archives.
I always thought HK should have its own URL shortener, maybe assigning a UUID per email, unique across all lists and domains. This would already cut the URLs from say: http://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/infrastructure@lists.fedoraproj... to http://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/msg/EOIQM6E32PSGAHVYBY5OSFXKDHE33ZCQ
Pierre