Official shortened URL service [duplicate]

Question

I think it might be a good idea to have a URL-shortening service for each of the Stack Overflow family of sites.

Since questions, and answers all have a unique id, it should be fairly easy to use that for shortening the URLs.

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For example: _{^{(Could easily be shorter)}}

http://short-SO-url.com/1234

This could easily point to a question, or an answer. All this would need to do is redirect to:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1234

Or if it is an answer, point to:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/{question-id}/-/1234#1234

_{^{You need something between the question id, and the answer id. That is why there is /-/ in the URL.}}

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Right now, if you want a shorter URL, you have to use a third-party URL shortener which can point to anywhere. It is also difficult, or impossible to know that it doesn't redirect to a malicious website. If there were an official URL shortener that only worked for Stack Overflow, you would know for sure that it is safe.

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This would be easier if there was an internal interface to redirect to the correct URL.

http://stackoverflow.com/api/post/1234.301

It could redirect to the correct URL regardless of if it is an answer or a question. _{^{301 redirect}}

Answer 1

The following is officially supported and redirects to the full URL (using a 302 Found):

meta.stackoverflow.com/q/23834

Also, despite the /q for /question: if this happens to be an answer ID, it redirects properly too. But I am not sure if that is official too? Like:

meta.stackoverflow.com/q/75352

...redirects to

meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/23834/official-shortened-url-service/75352#75352

Note that, before redirecting, the latter gets one a 404^† if the answer is deleted, even when the question still exists. The long URL would then take one to the question instead.

As an aside: exotic domain names, like Libya's .ly as used by bit.ly, might not be very future proof.

^{† Users who can see deleted posts, won't get the 404. I guess that's the reason for the 302 Found (along with Cache-Control: private) rather than 301 Moved Permanently.}

Answer 2

URLs on stack overflow are already pretty short, especially once you remove the post title and such. In your example, you aren't really saving that much. I think if you wanted something considerably shorter, you'd have to go to something like tinyurl has, and you'd end up with something like

http://stackoverflow.com/url/D839d8D

Which still wouldn't gain you much over the already pretty short url of

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1234256

With answers, it gets a bit longer but I think that we could come up with a link to an answer like

http://stackoverflow.com/answers/1234256

and then a database lookup could be done to direct you to the correct question. Same thing could be done for comments.

Doing something like this for direct links to answers and comments would be much easier to costruct your own URL, and would keep much more to the MVC spirit of things.

Answer 3

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001276.html

Answer 4

What would be the benefit? Only thing I can think off the top of my head is less text to send back to the client, which I'm not sure outweighs the cost of maintaining the additional system.

Answer 5

I think this is a good idea now that we have a "share on Twitter" button. I just used this for the first time and Twitter shortened the URL. If it's going to get shortened anyway, we should have our own shortener. As site owners, it would allow you to better keep track of what people are actually clicking on. Here's a screenshot:

Answer 6

We do have a URL shortener for sites, but it doesn't navigate to individual pages. Just sites.

What shortened URLs are available through s.tk?