Show HN: I made a URL expander because short links are too mainstream

[farmeroy]

This is great but it's stuck checking if I'm a bot... i get this in the console: ``` auto/:1 The resource https://challenges.cloudflare.com/cdn-cgi/challenge-platform... was preloaded using link preload but not used within a few seconds from the window's load event. Please make sure it has an appropriate `as` value and it is preloaded intentionally. ```

[nojs]

> it's stuck checking if I'm a bot

Man I am seeing this _everywhere_ now. If you don’t have a clean residential US IP half the internet doesn’t work.

[error404x]

Sorry, CAPTCHA caused issues. My other project got a bot attack, so I have added CAPTCHA to all my projects. I didn't realize captcha was causing problems to users

[jrochkind1]

Same. I have EFF "Privacy Badger" installed on chrome, I guess that's it?

[MarkSweep]

I like the concept. A similar idea that is no longer on the web was “shady url”. It would make links that looked like http:// shadyurl.com/nader-for-president.exe

[kristopolous]

I had one that would turn the urls into wild news stories. I had news-sounding domains like nyeveningpost.com and an auto-generation of bogus stubs such as nyeveningpost.com/breaking/mit-demonstrates-time-travel

Then it would either redirect humans like a normal service or serve a page with meta tags to the crawlers so the card info on social media would have a thumbnail saying "breaking news" and a markov generated caption such as "Earlier today researchers successfully demonstrated time travel at MIT" with the stub matching the title just to increase the chaos.

Ran it a couple of years. Not only did nobody use it but the response was universally discouraging and negative.

Lesson: People enjoy facsimiles of things they find repulsive when it becomes too real. All things have an uncanny valley. It's why people, for example, don't go to butcher shops and pick up animal organs for Halloween decorations.

I find the uncanny valley to be a wonderful artistic experience, like a psychological rollercoaster where there's always something new. But that's a very niche response

[thaumasiotes]

The partner project to shadyurl.com was hugeurl.com, which is exactly the same concept as here. hugeurl.com seems to have gone down.

[elicash]

It's the perfect con.

If it were TRULY shady, no way they'd use such an obvious URL. Must be safe and a joke!

[cubefox]

That's hilarious.

[manchmalscott]

It generated a link too long to send over discord, even with nitro (over 4000 characters). That’s hysterical.

[efokschaner]

Fun site, I found an Easter egg:

https://urlshortenersaresoyesterdaytrythisamazingsuperlongur...

This reminded me of a backend-less filesharing site I once made

https://efokschaner.github.io/furl-unfurl/#/

[v3ss0n]

Nice One. Never expected such quality Easter egg. Will find more again 10/10.

[lopkeny12ko]

I don't understand how you're supposed to use this. How do you pass the bot check? There's just a button that says "checking if you're a bot..." and clicking it does nothing.

[is_true]

By not being a bot. Unfortunately I just learnt I'm a bot.

[petee]

On my phone it takes about 10-15 seconds before the bottom enabled, and I didnt click it; i assume their bot prevention is literally just timing them out

[rolph]

use cURL, or httrack.

[v3ss0n]

You monster.. whoever hate AI and LLM should start using it daily. It will make a lot of semantic tokenizers gone crazy.

Nice bait mate.

[dmitshur]

There also was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40543196 4 months ago.

[tkgally]

From 1999, according to the page footer:

> © 1999 url shorteners are so yesterday try this amazing super long url expander . All rights reserved.

I tried to confirm that, but the Internet Archive and Wayback Machine are still down.

[oefrha]

It's a Show HN. People typically don't post Show HNs for what they made 25 years ago.

  > whois urlshortenersaresoyesterdaytrythisamazingsuperlongurlexpander.site
  ...
  Domain Name: URLSHORTENERSARESOYESTERDAYTRYTHISAMAZINGSUPERLONGURLEXPANDER.SITE
  Registry Domain ID: D492058866-CNIC
  Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.hostinger.com
  Registrar URL: https://www.hostinger.com/
  Updated Date: 2024-10-08T18:01:33.0Z
  Creation Date: 2024-10-08T18:01:29.0Z
  Registry Expiry Date: 2025-10-08T23:59:59.0Z
  ...

so no, it can't be more than four days old.

[arendtio]

The same here. If you ask me, the first appeared a few years later, but human memories are erroneous.

[etewiah]

Ha ha, love this.

It just so happens that I am working on a tool that ends up expanding hacker news urls. The problem I was solving was that of managing lots of replies to a successful post.

I allow you to replace the "ycombinator" in a hacker news item url with "gipety" so this current thread would point to:

https://news.gipety.com/item?id=41780255

You will then get a page that remembers the comments currently displayed. On subsequent refreshes you will see any new comments highlighted in green.

As I worked on it I decided to also add a slug as I got tired of not recognising what the urls I was copy pasting were referring to.

The above will for example end up generating this:

https://news.gipety.com/hn/41780255/k/67/s/show-hn-i-made-a-...

[m0d0nne11]

As with so many sites lately, the "checking if you're a bot" stuff is dainbramaged and b0rken...

[crazygringo]

Ha! Hilarious.

Most of all, I love the fact that, unlike URL shorteners, there's no need to maintain a database of redirects.

I do wonder what the actual encoding scheme is, and how robust it is to lopping off chunks of the URL, since there's presumably lots of room for redundancy...

[bobbylarrybobby]

I deleted one character from the expanded url and got sent to a very interesting webpage indeed

[error404x]

Omg, I didn't check HN for a few days. Sorry, Turnstile was causing issues for everyone, so I have removed it for now. This is just a fun project :)

[ryukoposting]

After "checking my browser" I try to put in the URL I want to shorten, I click the button, and nothing happens. The URL is hardfault.life, for what it's worth.

[sgarland]

It seems to need the scheme portion of the URL, not just the authority.

[cubefox]

Well you tried to shorten it, of course it doesn't work!

[ks2048]

Yeah, not working for me. The button says "Checking if you're a bot..." and nothing happening. Console shows a warning regarding "The resource at “https://challenges.cloudflare.com/..."

[rendall]

Here you go:

https://urlshortenersaresoyesterdaytrythisamazingsuperlongur...

[sleepychu]

Ah, I thought this might be for turning tiny/tracking URLs into their targets like my Hacktoberfest project from a few years back

https://off-the-rails.netlify.app/

[antegamisou]

The adaptation is too retro I feel.

It should instead append at the end of the URL some 1000-character long token with a ton of other irrelevant arguments.

You know, exactly how Google Search loves to do when you right-click a search result and the address gets brutally scrambled.

[abcd_f]

It shows "Checking if you are a bot" and nothing is tappable.

I am on a recent iOS.

[usmanity]

this is great, my succinct little domain that's 6 characters long including TLD was turned into 4000 characters, awesome!

[piyuv]

Love the design!

[AlienRobot]

theofficialabsolutelongestdomainnameregisteredontheworldwideweb.international finally has a worthy opponent.

[frabjoused]

Your bot checker needs some UX help.