[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Joshua Juran) writes: [...] > > Google for "NCI gtk". There is also a weekly summary entry but the > > xrl.us shortcut seems to have expired.
If I found the same link you found then it's not the xrl.us shortcut - http://xrl.us/cw78 - but the Google group link that stopped working. > I was wondering about that. I Googled for "tinyurl considered > harmful" and was surprised to find only one message, discussing the > phishing risks. I found no mention of the risk of outsourcing a > bottleneck to a third party who has zero obligation or direct interest > to continue providing the service. The use case for the Metamark service was actually to have a "short links" service for the perl list summaries (and for the perl community in general) to use that's not "outsourced". (Metamark is running on a server a few feet above the servers your mail went through to go out to the list subscribers). > From <http://metamark.net/about#expire>: > > > Do Metamark links expire? > > > > The Metamark urls expire after five years or two years after the > > last usage - whichever comes later. However, if a link is never [...] > > Of course, this is subject to change and is no promise but just my > > intentions as of this writing. If you want guarantees you can make > > your own service. > To be quite frank, I'm astonished the practice exists here in the > first place. In my opinion it goes directly against the spirit of [...] Are you talking about expiring links or putting the short links in the mails that go out? Apart from the occasional phishing link then we haven't actually expired any of the metamark urls yet. I did some random spot checks on old short URLs used in the summaries and they get used regularly[1] so even if/when we start expiring unused links in a few years they won't go away. [1] by humans or bots, I don't know - for your privacy we don't track more than a daily count. - ask -- ask bjoern hansen, http://www.askbjoernhansen.com/ !try; do();
