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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)):

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.

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  • 1
    We might need something more powerful, say the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch?
    – Ghanima Mod
    Jul 13 '18 at 4:57
  • Might be worth noting that the post text here is copied from this older Meta.SE post. Also you might want to check your bit.ly search link; it's currently searching Blender.SE instead of here.
    – Aurora0001
    Jul 13 '18 at 11:29
  • bit.ly is now cleaned
    – Chenmunka
    Jul 31 '18 at 8:53
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Such an idea is great going forward, but please don't dreg through the site's older content simply to alter working URL links. It's not worth the disruption caused on the front page.

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