What is Digg?Sponsored by Rockstar Games
Grand Theft Auto: Episodes from Liberty City view!
rockstargames.com - Out Now on Disc for Xbox 360. Includes The Lost and Damned plus the all-new The Ballad of Gay Tony.
51 Comments
- TommyVallier, on 07/09/2009, -0/+31I actually ran a URL shortener - Tweetl - for about 8 months. It was one of the first to offer stats, a super-short domain (t-l.cc) quick previews (so that you could simply add a character to the URL and it would give you the address and make you click to redirect) and we were testing user features.
I stopped the service as a direct result of having to fight the spammers. Because of the appeal of having click traffic data, I was hit pretty bad and by the time I closed up shop, nearly 95% of the URLs coming in were from spammers. I still had a great deal of regular URLs too, about 70/day, but the spam was unruly.
At one point, the server I had been hosting with was contacted saying that the IP was to be blacklisted by SpamHaus due to the number of links in spam pointing at it.
It's not like I didn't try, too - I had captchas in place, and a URL creation delay (You had to wait 2-5 minutes between submitting two URLs) and a pair of blacklists (One for domains, one for the IPs they pointed to) and I implemented a check of every URL coming in against a blacklist run by anti-spam groups (whose name eludes me). When I did all of this, they just went to other redirect services and then submitted those new short URLs to me. While I could have blacklisted the domains, I took the programmer's approach and started checking headers of all submitted sites - Anything with a 301 or 302 wasn't allowed. Their move? They found redirect services that would spit out a 200 code.
It was a long and painful battle that they eventually won. I poured over 800 hours into the fight though before tapping out and closing it down. I wish bit.ly, is.gd and all the others luck. - novenator, on 07/08/2009, -1/+25I wish I could punch the spammers on Twitter (and the few on Digg) in the taint.
- uberduger, on 07/09/2009, -0/+13Lol, fantastic point, InvaderDem! I particularly enjoyed the part about the Unless you trust the!
You are quite like me, I think. For more peoples like us (and maybe some datings too, who knows!), visit my blog at
http://www.free_dating_no_virus_honest.com/
Regards,
Hakim
(There. How was that? I could totally be a spambot.) - tempysmurf, on 07/09/2009, -1/+13Gee, didn't see that one coming.
- Contradictions, on 07/09/2009, -0/+9That's why I don't click on tinyurls and other similar crap. I am not looking for a surprise invitation to lemonparty.org
- waydee, on 07/09/2009, -0/+9The default behaviour of all URL shortening services should be to display the full URL and ask if the user is sure they want to be redirected there - not as neat and I know that most services already offer this as an option but to make this the default makes sense I think.
- KWeasel, on 07/09/2009, -0/+8Don't click links from strangers? Congratulations, you just killed digg.
- plotoman, on 07/09/2009, -0/+8Spammers are bastards.
- Smoko, on 07/09/2009, -0/+8I made a URL shortening site once so I'd have easy access to all the links I had made. I didn't advertise it anywhere but spammers still found and used it (Or my friends are secret spammers, who knows?). Sure it wasn't a heap of them but I'm sure if I kept the service going the amount of spammers using it would have grown over time.
I can't really think of a reasonable way to stop the problem unless you were to implement a system where domains could be flagged as spam and then blocked from being used after a human verifies it.
And yes, I even had it set up to show the original URL for 5 seconds before redirecting to it. The problem is that spammers just don't care either way because not everyone pays attention to links they load in the background. - inactive, on 07/08/2009, -0/+7 From the Article- Culture of Twitter — with people urgently retweeting links, often without even clicking on them — is sure to contribute to the spam problem in the months ahead.
That's what the problem is with twitter. People are trying hard to make there presence feel on twitter & for that they keep on tweeting & retweeting(without even knowing wtf they are rting? It has become a game of numbers, more are your followers more popular you are.
- inactive, on 07/09/2009, -1/+7URL shortening is great and all, as long as you stick the actual URL in the roll-over text. Otherwise, ***** off, just give me the actual URL from the beginning.
- InvaderDem, on 07/09/2009, -2/+7Unless you trust the person offering the link ... don't click on it. Problem solved. I mean, figuring out if they're a spammer or not really isn't that hard ...
- CleoQKazoo, on 07/09/2009, -0/+4https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/863 ...
- Junkyarddawg, on 07/08/2009, -1/+5http://www.somethingawful.com/d/news/hoobastank-tw ...
- HareBall, on 07/09/2009, -0/+3See the above comment from TommyVallier.
- jtobe, on 07/09/2009, -0/+3No need to get your hands dirty.
Just kick them http://jalopnik.com/5305842/repo-man-recovering-de ... - paulsmith288, on 07/09/2009, -0/+3http://sh.orten.it/
- JudgeMonkey, on 07/09/2009, -0/+3url shortening should only be used in cases where you actually have a text limit, or can't create a hyperlink at all.
I hate seeing blog posts with short urls in them, in that case, just link to the damn long url with a proper hyperlink, as has been the standard since the dawn of links. - LilRabbitFooFoo, on 07/09/2009, -0/+3I don't click on "shortened" URLs for just this reason.
Isn't this whole "business" just centered around a few web forums that have ***** URL wrapping code? Why did WE have to change for THEIR poor programming skills?! - waydee, on 07/09/2009, -0/+3Best use of twitter I've ever seen
- designcode, on 07/09/2009, -0/+2I personally getting tired of short urls, You click on a link shared on Facebook, its first take you to facebook.com/l.php?SOMESTUFF here, then it takes to some other short url and then finally you end up on your destination, why do I need a short url in this case??
- sodade, on 07/09/2009, -0/+2Couldn't they spoof it?
- nepidae, on 07/09/2009, -0/+2so much win
- peestandingup, on 07/09/2009, -1/+3Yeah, we'd never do something like that on Digg.
Now, Im gonna go listen to some Rick Astley. - jordanmoore, on 07/09/2009, -0/+1Don't tell that to the Youtube trolls in the other topic.
- earlygreytwinni, on 07/08/2009, -0/+1This is not surpising. Some things, like bit.ly provide the ability to see what url you are going to before hand (I think there is a firefox extension which does multiple url shortners). One of the downsides of 140 char limmit :(
- LeviTheSmith, on 07/09/2009, -0/+1How about implementing a CAPTCHA?
- nepidae, on 07/09/2009, -0/+1Yes, twitter is basically a spam service. How is this news to anybody?
- CleoQKazoo, on 07/09/2009, -0/+1https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/863 ...
- Paulish, on 07/09/2009, -0/+1Man. Spammers really ***** suck. They can all ***** off.
- CleoQKazoo, on 07/09/2009, -0/+1Firefox add on to preview urls. works for all the ones ive use so far, owly, the tech crunch and digg too.n https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/863 ...
- WikiEasy, on 07/09/2009, -0/+1Damn you got me good on that one...
- front243, on 07/09/2009, -0/+1I use spamcop.net to report spam. I have seen shortened URL's for a while so I send off an email to spamcop if they might want to "de-obfuscate" the shortened URL's so you could report to the correct hosting service. They answered me that the URL shortening services were very prompt to close those URL's so there was no reason. So actually its not that bad :)
- inactive, on 07/12/2009, -0/+1True. But it's better than a completely blind link. Direct linking is best though.
- shalinshaun, on 07/09/2009, -1/+2Please don't click :
http://bit.ly/IsfjS
NOR this
http://bit.ly/iAOrv - Vesuvias, on 07/09/2009, -0/+1How about the chode?
- GordonV, on 07/09/2009, -0/+1I think most people want well defined links rather then ASCII garble hyperlinks.
- Haplo, on 07/09/2009, -0/+1tinyurl already has this feature. But it will not stop spam. Spam is stopped at the source, not by making up all kind of "features".
- silverfox08, on 07/09/2009, -0/+1I was complaining about this months ago. When digg launched the digg bar and entered the url shortening world I posted why nobody was concerned about this. I HATE short URLS. Thanks twitter.
- krisrm, on 07/09/2009, -0/+1Wow. That's tempting.
(to throw that aside, they're Sucuri and GiganticURL... helpful for solving the temptation problem without ending up knee deep in questionable sites...) - brea2, on 07/09/2009, -0/+1stupid spammers
- whytey, on 07/09/2009, -1/+1No its leakspin
- cloudberries, on 07/09/2009, -1/+1I'm actually just curious. Is that, or is that not meatspin?
- fibericon, on 07/11/2009, -0/+0Really? URL shortening has spammers? Naw!
Seriously, welcome to the inception of URL shortening. The first time I ever saw a link that was shortened it was spam. For a while I actually thought tinyurl was a spam site. - Haplo, on 07/09/2009, -1/+1Digg: digg them down, report them, and block them.
- HeavyWave, on 07/09/2009, -4/+3Who uses URL shortening anyway? Can't see any good reasons to shorten URL to a bunch of random symbols.
- djamp42, on 07/09/2009, -1/+0URL SHORTENING IS DUMB!
- inactive, on 07/09/2009, -4/+1No matter what they say, spamming rocks. Here's why:
1)It keeps you busy deleting spam
2)It makes sure the e-mail service never dies
3)It creates a market for autoresponder and mailer services
Where's the problem? -
Show 51 - 53 of 53 discussions
© Digg Inc. 2009
— Content created and posted by Digg users is