Are TinyUrls not allowed on this site? I used them for all the links in my profile and instead of saying "tinyurl" in the URL it says "*******" and my links don't work. Is there any alternative that ACC profiles support?

bit.ly :P

dft.ba works as well.

URL shortners have been blocked because they can be used exploitation of the site. Granted we can't block all of them but thanks for the help guys!

Exploitation of the site? Well that's a bummer. I need to use them so my profile doesn't go over the limit. Which moves me to make a thread on site suggestions.

They're been blocked? What? Why wasn't there an announcement / rule change? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I can't find this policy anywhere else on the site.

They've been blocked for a while now.

It's been a few years, at least. We don't make announcements for every word that we add to the language filter, and this is really no different. Nor is it a 'policy' - just a way to prevent site exploits from happening.

Does that mean that we can use URL shorteners if they are not in the filter?

Honest question - what really is the purpose of using a URL shortener, unless you're trying to avoid going over character count? Not only can they be used to execute exploits, but it makes users less aware of the site they're about to go to.

To shorten URLs

We only get 75 characters in our sig and 8000 in our profiles, a 10-12 character url is better than a 50 character one

^ True, but I think he wants to know why they should be used outside of preserving the character limit. I thought about this, and I agree that exploitation is the only reason I can think of. Unless a person shortens a URL for other people on a mobile device to make it work faster, but I'm not sure if that is even a reason.

I guess some people think it looks neater.

Honestly, the only reason I'm using them is so all of my profile can fit. I just spent 15 minutes trying to cut out different parts of my profile so most of it can stay with the shorteners. If we were forced to use the full URL, my profile would be half the size it is now to accomodate for the character count.

"Honest question - what really is the purpose of using a URL shortener, unless you're trying to avoid going over character count? Not only can they be used to execute exploits, but it makes users less aware of the site they're about to go to."

I've run into this problem a couple of times and it's very frustrating, sometimes when posting a link the word filter will think that something in it is a "word that is not allowed" which means I'll have to use a URL shortener. I remember the first time it happened was when the URL had /b in it and the filter wouldn't allow it.