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:
>
> *
https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-infrastructure/ticket/5173
>
> 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.fedorap...
>
> *
https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-infrastructure/ticket/4450
> Short redirects to LiveCD images (including spins)
>
> This could apply to any of the common media we point people to.
>
> *
https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-infrastructure/ticket/4931
> 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:
>
> 1. 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: