Greetings. I thought I would start a bit of discussion on url shorteners. In the past we had paste.fedoraproject.org output a short url for every paste using the 'ur1.ca' service. ur1.ca is nice because they are 100% open source. However, at some point they became very slow, so the command line 'fpaste' tool would take a long time and then eventually timeout. So, we disabled that and haven't been doing any short urls for pastes. There are however some places where people have requested we use url shorteners over the years: * https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-infrastructure/ticket/5173 The mailman3 archived-at header link (which is a link to the hyperkitty archive of a specific post). It's long and ugly like: http://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/infrastructure@lists.fedorap... * https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-infrastructure/ticket/4450 Short redirects to LiveCD images (including spins) This could apply to any of the common media we point people to. * https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-infrastructure/ticket/4931 fpaste using ur1.ca. (The use case here is if you have a machine barely on the net so you can use the fpaste command to paste something, but need to retype that url into another computer to get someone else to help you look at it, the short url is much easier to type. * Other service that uses urls that might be nice to shorten for some reason. I'm sure we could think of more places they might be handy. So, options: 1. Just punt and keep going the way we are. We have lived without them this long. 2. See if we can help ur1.ca and/or if they are fast enough for us now and just use them for everything. However, if we do, I would like to talk with them and make sure it's all good, as we might generate a lot of links if we do every email post. 3. Pick some other url shortener. Personally, I like using one thats open source and shares our values, but we would just be using it as an external service, so perhaps we don't care so much. If we pick some other one we should make sure they can handle our volume, etc. 4. Run one ourself. Note: this is "run" NOT "write". I do not want us spending developer time writing something like this. There's tons of them out there. The popular ones are in php (bah), but I am sure we can pick one that meets our needs if we look. There's even some flask based ones out there. ( like https://github.com/ugcoder/Py-URL-Shortener ) Thoughts? kevin