This is just an idea I'm going to throw out there. It seems a bit odd to suggest it because any link is a good link, right? Maybe not.<p>Anyway, something like this in a bit of javascript would prevent people from linking to your site using a url shortener:<p><pre><code> <script>
if (document.referrer.indexOf('bit.ly') > 0
|| document.referrer.indexOf('someothershortener')>0)
document.location.href='http://yoursite.com/noshortener.html';
</script>
</code></pre>
Put in that noshortener.html some content that will tell people why you don't allow shorteners to your content, here are some suggestions:<p><pre><code> 1) You want to know where your visitors are coming
from and shorteners steal the real referrer.
2) Shorteners are a layer of indirection that could
be modified beyond the user of the shortener's
discretion to do something like digg is doing now
3) If the shortener goes away, the link to the
content is no longer valid
4) It slows down the web due to one more DNS lookup,
one more server redirect, etc...
</code></pre>
Most users of shorteners, when they use one to link to a site are going to click the link just to make sure it works. When they do, they'll see your banned url shorteners page and it will help all of us "experts" in the web who understand why url shorteners are bad educate the lay users of the web as to why those url shorteners are bad.<p>Yes, we take a hit, but we are sacrificing a little traffic for a better web experience in the future.
None of the reasons you listed are significant to the person reading them. It is not the visitor's problem that you can't track referrers or that it slows down the web, and the fact that they're seeing this page means the shortened is working as intended. Furthermore, you're basically making it impossible to share links to your site on Twitter (where they get auto-shortened).<p>All in all, you're doing little more than pissing off visitors you've probably worked pretty hard to get.
I'm all for blocking framing sites like the Diggbar, but killing all URL shorteners is a bad idea, IMO.<p>With Twitter growing so fast and <i>automatically</i> shortening pasted URLs, you could actually be losing some quality traffic if people start talking about your business/app/site.
Honest question: Why do you care?<p>Consider this like an impromptu poll about why you care about not getting linked via a shortener. (If you <i>don't</i> care, I'd ask that you not post a reply to my message here, though I obviously can't enforce that.) I ask because I wouldn't care, but I am interested with an open mind in why someone would.
I tend to think that any link and visit is a good one. What I would prefer to do is using the above javascript, detect incoming traffic from URL shorteners and display my own informational bar across the top with the pages real URL and perhaps simple stats of how many people were referred to that page using a shortened link.
While we're talking about it, here's a feature I'd like to see these URL Shortening services impliment:<p>- If the "Shortened" URL you are about to give me is actually <i>longer</i> than the URL I gave you, just give me back that URL.<p>I see this sort of thing on Twitter all the time, and it drives me nuts. "hey, check out:<p><a href="http://tinyurl.com/mweytn" rel="nofollow">http://tinyurl.com/mweytn</a><p>... which redirects you to...<p><a href="http://twiddla.com/" rel="nofollow">http://twiddla.com/</a><p>Uh... What exactly have you shortened again?
The reasons you give are all valid reasons. However, you miss the reason most likely to sway end-users: a shortener service can relate every page a user has seen to that user (or at least, to his ip). The privacy angle is the biggest factor imo.<p>In your info page you may also want to promote Untiny (<a href="http://untiny.com/extra/" rel="nofollow">http://untiny.com/extra/</a>) as a service which helps bypass shorteners with minimum fuss.
This is exactly why I use noscript.<p>But anyway, why not a standard API, similar to robots.txt or favicon.ico that will let each site control shortening? Requesting <a href="http://foo.com/shorten?url=http://foo.com/long/url/goes/here" rel="nofollow">http://foo.com/shorten?url=http://foo.com/long/url/goes/here</a> will return <a href="http://foo.com/lkjdhf" rel="nofollow">http://foo.com/lkjdhf</a> or whatever.
I think if you're going to do this it'd be better done as a server side redirect, like through .htaccess<p>However even though I'm, in general, against URL shorteners, I wouldn't do this because I think there are some situations where they are helpful.
As a user if you did that to me I would just close the link and lose interest in your site....<p>Yes, agreed, the DiggBar style thing IS annoying and we should stop that. But short links are <i>important</i>.<p>Several forums I frequent insist you use shortners for URL's longer than 25 characters (you get a warning if you dont!) to keep things neat. Twitter - your isntantly killing traffic from that crowd.<p>Now, showing a box on the page with some of that info would be useful / understandable.
it would be nice if url shorteners did a double redirect so that the following happened:<p>1) user clicks on <a href="http://sho.rt/abcdef" rel="nofollow">http://sho.rt/abcdef</a> located on <a href="http://original-referrer.com" rel="nofollow">http://original-referrer.com</a><p>2) sho.rt redirects to <a href="http://sho.rt/abcdef?original-referrer=http://original-referrer.com" rel="nofollow">http://sho.rt/abcdef?original-referrer=http://original-refer...</a><p>3) second url redirects to the content.<p>in this way, content owners will know where their traffic is coming from, people who place shortened urls don't have to do anything special and the pasted urls remain short. the only downside is a slight increase to latency to retrieve the second redirect.
Why not pass the url the user was trying to visit to your noshortener page? Then you can have a brief blurb and let them click the link to continue. You still don't get full referrer information, but it's better than nothing and the user gets to view the content.
Might find this list of URL shorteners useful: <a href="http://www.listable.org/show/url-shortening-sites" rel="nofollow">http://www.listable.org/show/url-shortening-sites</a> (can be exported as JSON/SQL/plaintext)
ALl links will die someday! Not every website is going to be around forever!<p>The only ppl who hate on URL shorteners is this crowd here while millions of others usual them daily!<p>We are hackers and thus if this is such a big issue and change, one of us should do something about it. Something that works for the users and solves the issue about 3% of all users rant about!
I have no idea what your beef is, I think you have a stick up your ass about something.<p>Why you think you're some sort of web "expert" is beyond me. A real expert wouldn't be using javascript for this for a start.<p>Punishing third parties because of some moral crusade is dumb.<p>Slows down the web hahahah jeesh.