The Request
I set out on the Crusade for the Holy Grail of no-redirections (named by Denilson Sá) to eliminate every shortened URL on Stack Overflow. But the foreign hordes are overwhelming me, and I need reinforcements!
The Mission
Find every shortened URL, follow it, check it and inline the unshortened/long version into the post, like this:
For details see the documentation here: http://tinyurl.com/3zbelpa
Turns into:
See the documentation for further details.
Watch out for hidden LMGTFY links and flag them for Moderator Attention
if the answer only consists of those. If the answer does also hold valuable information like other links or further information, edit the LMGTFY-Link out, and leave the above link for future reference.
If you encounter links to duplicates, vote to close
/flag
the question, and edit the answer anyway.
But, watch out for traps! As Joel Coehoorn♦ informed me, there are edge-cases which need the existence of shortened URLs. Including but not limited to:
- Certain Wikipedia-Links
- Archive.org Wayback-Machine
- Browsershots.org
- Google Books
Make sure that you're not breaking any of these by inlining them.
If you find shortened URLs in comments, there's at the moment not much we can do about them. LMGTFY and other objectionable content needs to be cleansed flagged none the less.
Also there are shortened URLs hiding in the woods (known to some as "Code"), these are no danger to our lands and can therefore be left unchecked and unchallenged.
The Tools
Our most valuable light in the darkness of the night is the search (roughly sorted by number of hits, cleaned ones at the bottom (doesn't mean that they don't come back)):
- Goo.gl
1615 Results
CLEANED UP
Please add all url shorteners you find used on the site to this list
While paying a visit, Rob Hruska showed us the way to a magician which allows us to see beyond shortened URLs without fear for ourselves. Jeff Mercado also showed as an apparatus which does the same. These are only tools on our crusade to protect and help ourselves, we need to cleanse the land from redirections nonetheless.
The Reward
Eternal honor and glory...and of course you can keep every captured Flag-Weight and Badge.