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kinda glad url shorteners have fallen out of favour these days but it sucks how long they were popular and how much everyone used them
RE: https://social.kernel.org/objects/39125e2b-0997-4c90-86f9-b16229bf4b52


Ah joy ... Google is turning off its URL shortener and breaking every link that ever used it:

https://developers.googleblog.com/en/google-url-shortener-links-will-no-longer-be-available/

A quick search on lore.kernel.org:

https://lore.kernel.org/all/?q=goo.gl%2F

...turns up about 19,000 messages with affected links. That's a lot of history that is going to become harder (or impossible) to find.




Imagine relying on url shorteners in the first place.
RE: https://social.kernel.org/objects/39125e2b-0997-4c90-86f9-b16229bf4b52


Ah joy ... Google is turning off its URL shortener and breaking every link that ever used it:

https://developers.googleblog.com/en/google-url-shortener-links-will-no-longer-be-available/

A quick search on lore.kernel.org:

https://lore.kernel.org/all/?q=goo.gl%2F

...turns up about 19,000 messages with affected links. That's a lot of history that is going to become harder (or impossible) to find.


in reply to 27329ed9-2211-a1ba-9371-e2641bf0dcb6

I literally always thought they were both a security and a longevity risk, and I'm not glad to see that I'm right. Curse Twitter for making people feel the need to shorten their URLs so much. I've seen several other smaller shortener services dying over the years but this is the worst one.


Ah joy ... Google is turning off its URL shortener and breaking every link that ever used it:

https://developers.googleblog.com/en/google-url-shortener-links-will-no-longer-be-available/

A quick search on lore.kernel.org:

https://lore.kernel.org/all/?q=goo.gl%2F

...turns up about 19,000 messages with affected links. That's a lot of history that is going to become harder (or impossible) to find.

in reply to Jonathan Corbet

Does this apply to shortened links to Google Forms surveys which can still be generated today?
in reply to 183231bcb

@183231bcb those use "forms.gle" now so I wouldn't think so.
in reply to Erisa

Oh, Google has more than one URL shortener, just to confuse me, and the one they are shutting down is not the one I use. Cool.
in reply to Jonathan Corbet

@Jonathan Corbet I wonder if there's a project to archive those expanded links... wait, does archive.org archive them?

TJ reshared this.

in reply to Shiri Bailem

ArchiveTeam has software you can run on your computers to help archive all kinds of services that are about to shut down, and one of their long-term projects (URLTeam) archives URL shorteners (from what I can tell, goo.gl isn't currently being actively archived, but I assume that'll change soon)
in reply to [GARLIC] Lunya :trans_verify: :lesbian_verify:πŸ§„

Thank you. This was what I was looking for.

@textfiles

Is almost certainly already aware of this, but tagging him here just in case.

[Edit] never mind. He already chimed in down thread.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to [GARLIC] Lunya :trans_verify: :lesbian_verify:πŸ§„

@luna @shiri URLTeam's been scraping goo.gl since 2019, according to the wiki. Fingers crossed that means things are in hand. But more archiveteam warrior VMs set to "archive team's choice" are always welcome.
in reply to Dave Anderson

I thought it wasn't because under the warrior projects section, according to the reference at the start of the section pink is currently being scraped, and the row for goo.gl is white
in reply to Jonathan Corbet

Archive.org is up for helping...

The original URL shorteners thought about this, and archived their links with archive.org .

https://archive.org/details/301works?tab=about

I hope google joins now, and gives us the host domain so we can make them continue to work (redirect into the wayback machine that would archive the redirect).

please.

in reply to Jonathan Corbet

Maybe Google could ameliorate the pain of killing their Short URL service by setting up a system where you could query one of their short URLs that are going away, and get back a redirect to the URL it originally pointed to.
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