Is there a way to shorten Stack Overflow URLs?

Question

There is a link to refer to a Stack Overflow question, but does SO provide a shortened URL?

Answer 1

You can remove the whole part after the question ID (in the case of this question, the /is-there-a-way-to-shorten-the-stack-overflow-urls).

The longer, more manual way:

The formula for shortening a question is sitename + .com/q/ + question id

This question's full URL is http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/164194/is-there-a-way-to-shorten-the-stack-overflow-urls

The shortened version is http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/164194.

Similarly, you can do this with any other site in the SE network:

http://cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/2574/why-add-salt-to-the-water-when-cooking-pasta

becomes

http://cooking.stackexchange.com/q/2574.

The fewer-things-to-delete way:

Use the "share" link underneath any question or answer. The URL you see in the pop-up follows the formula above, but it appends your user ID to the end (so that you can get badges like Announcer). You can copy & paste the whole URL in the "share" box, or strip your user ID from the end. Either way, it's short.

Answer 2

Some StackExchange general and community pages can be reached by STK's own URL shortener, http://s.tk/. (see What shortened URLs are available through s.tk?)

For questions, however, this seems not to work.

Answer 3

You could always use http://tinyurl.com/ if you want to shorten a URL for sharing.

If you want to name your url w/ Markdown you can always use brackets: [Linking in StackOverflow] (https://stackoverflow.com/editing-help#links)