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.
2. See if we can help ur1.ca and/or if they are fast enough for us
now
and just use them for everything. However, if we do, I would like to
talk with them and make sure it's all good, as we might generate a lot
of links if we do every email post.
3. Pick some other url shortener. Personally, I like using one thats
open source and shares our values, but we would just be using it as an
external service, so perhaps we don't care so much. If we pick some
other one we should make sure they can handle our volume, etc.
Do we have a rough estimate of the volume we are speaking of ?
4. Run one ourself. Note: this is "run" NOT
"write". I do not want us
spending developer time writing something like this. There's tons of
them out there. The popular ones are in php (bah), but I am sure we can
pick one that meets our needs if we look. There's even some flask based
ones out there. ( like
https://github.com/ugcoder/Py-URL-Shortener )
Thoughts?
--
Michael Scherer