I’ve been working with my fantastic hosting company, DreamHost, who first warned me of the spam generated via ThnLnk, to control the creation of spam links through ThnLnk.
I’ll be implementing a sizable slew of them by the week’s end, and hopefully this will help stem the usage of ThnLnk for despicable purposes by the one or two responsible for this recent “rash.”
Thanks for your patience!
There has recently been a rash of probably one spammer who has been active in sending out links with ThnLnk URLs. I’ve just implemented a banning procedure for URLs and domains for which spam is associated. It bans the domains on the front-end–i.e., you can’t create ThnLnks for those domains–as well as on the back-end–using ThnLnks with those domain names redirects to a spam-page.
One fall-out from this is that people clicking on spam links immediately after we catch them will go to a ThnLnk-branded page, and so people will think that ThnLnk is sending the spam.
But we’re not. I have to figure out a way to get around this misconception. I think it’s just being proactive about blocking domains as soon as they start cropping up.
You can see the spam-warning page here.
One of the main purposes of ThnLnk is to create some credibility and accountability in URL shortening services. By including the domain name in the URL users can quickly check the “value” of a URL redirect based upon the domain.
So there is a bit of semantic and social protection against spam links. But it’s not perfect; people can still create “spam URLs” just for the HREF portion of links for some reason or another–perhaps just to obfuscate URLs.
I’m working on some heuristics to notify me about “spam-looking” URLs with a quick-and-dirty removal tool for spam links. So if you’re worried about ThnLnk aiding and abetting the world of Spamalot, then just know that we’re trying not to. And this is my commitment to try and stop spam.
I recently added a new ThnLnk type: ThnLnks with the domain name and a unique ID number.
But then I thought a few more seconds about it and added another:
http://thnlnk.com/thnlnk/080806/0000002162
ThnLnks with the domain name (a source), a creation date, and the unique ID number. This way you can put even more information in a URL used for a citation.
I also blogged about this in a push for using ThnLnk for legal citations.
Please use this post to report bugs or ask questions or make comments!
If you’re commenting about a spam-link, please read our posts on our efforts to control the use of our service by spammers — it’s not us, it’s them.