For whatever reason, ever-popular social networking web site Facebook have taken it upon themselves to start blocking nearly every URL shortening service under the sun, with the exception of fb.me (their own one!) and bitly, it would seem.
If someone posts a shortened URL on Facebook, it is accepted as a genuine post, like so:
However, if you try clicking on it, you get the following message:
As mentioned, this happens for nearly every URL shortening service under the sun. We tried fourteen different short URL providers, all but two were blocked.
Clearly at some point somebody has reported a shortened URL as malicious or bad (for whatever reason) and the powers that be at Facebook have simply decided to block the entire domain, rather than just the actual URL itself.
Utterly ridiculous...
We have tried and tried to get through to someone at Facebook to explain all the measures that we have put in place to prevent spam and malicious use of our services (plus that fact that any short URLs reported to us as being 'bad' are investigated and suspended within four hours of it being reported) but nobody ever replies to us. Ever.
We are not sure what else we can do, Facebook simply don't reply to our requests for discussion...
Therefore, if YOU know of anyone who works at Facebook, can you kindly put us in touch so we can explain they only need to block (or even report!) the actual URL in question, not an entire domain?
We are sure there are many other short URL providers in the same boat...
I only know one who works for Facebook, the former Mozilla employee (in fact, he is Firefox co-founder), @blakeross on Twitter.
ReplyDeleteThanks LouCypher, he's not been active on Twitter for a while. Found him on Facebook and have sent a friend request to see if we can open a channel for discussion. We'll let you know!
ReplyDeleteThanks, we're looking at it.
ReplyDelete