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Dear all readers,

I happened to stumble upon a list of available 2-letter domain names in the .rs domain space, and figured I’d get one just for the fun of it. I ended up settling on 1u.rs, as it could stand for 1 URL: Really Short, and I had wanted to run a public URL shortener for a while. So I purchased it, and began work on the URL shortener.

I am using yourls, a very flexible and extensible open source URL shortener written in php. I chose it partly because it’s what I run on my private URL shorteners, and also because it has extremely good plugins written for it, which could help cut down on spam (this was going to be a public URL shortener, after all). I installed several antispam as well as quality-of-life plugins so the users can easily create and share short URLs, and set it in action.

So far, I haven’t received any shortened URLs from anyone except myself, which lead me to write this post. I would like anyone interested to use 1u.rs for their shortening needs, and to tell their friends. In addition, another point of this post (and the reason I called it an experiment) was to try and get some spammers to find it. Yes, that’s right, I said spammers. I would be interested to see if the plugins I have installed can compete with the volume of spam that gets posted to URL shorteners. I do have quite a few plugins installed, including ip blacklist checks, domain blacklist checks, the new invisible recaptcha, and more. So spammers, let’s have at it, and see how well my system can stand up :-). The link: https://1u.rs/.

Anyway, that’s all for now, and I might be posting some more articles about how I modified some plugins to work or work better in yourls.

-Michael.