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converting a t.co (or other "short" URL


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I'd like to get to the "real" website referred to in a t.co or makeashorterlink or whatever URL. Is there any way to do that, short of following the link?

Asked on a local mailing list and was given the suggestion of unshorten.com for a web-based URL. There are Firefox and Chrome plugins to do this as well.

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  • 11 months later...

None of those (including the ones you haven't seen because Steve and Lou got to them first) had been banned before posting. Hence the "Report" button any member is urged to use to help out with keeping the place tidy. Umm ... I didn't see any reports myself but I guess you used it? And it's been cleared without evident action? Just trying to understand ...

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When I saw the post here from NABC full of spam links, they had already been banned, so yes, I probably should have use the report function instead, but also, I'd think that whoever did the banning would have searced for all posts from the userid.

DT

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When I saw one of the spam posts, I didn't bother to report it, since I figured that dealing with such posts would be a high priority for this place.

Regarding the original topic:

Asked on a local mailing list and was given the suggestion of unshorten.com for a web-based URL. There are Firefox and Chrome plugins to do this as well.

Can you recommend a specific Firefox addon?

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Another option is:

wget http://t.co/[removed] --spider

at least on Linux (distribution=Debian, version=wheezy). The "--spider" tells it to just check for the page without downloading it. So once it stops getting "301 Moved Permanently" redirects and gets a webpage, it should stop. Then the last location displayed would be the actual location.

The one I tested with (removed so I'm not advertising some random site) actually redirected to a bit.ly one that redirected to the final site, so apparently this method will handle multiple redirects.

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  • 1 month later...

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