Would you use a Client-Side URL shortener/encoder?

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1

Hello house,

It’s my first topic here and would like to keep this short.

One of my leisure period with JS sometime back brought this sought of in-house service to life and would like to know your take on it.
What the service does is to simply encode links and get it decoded from client-side when visited. However, it uses an external API to shorten links before encoding them, simply because this was developed based on base64(non-salted) and encoded string length could sometimes make you want to ask “What Are Those?”.

Kindly check it out at Encode.site and share your views, thanks.

1 Like
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I checked out the site. Everything seems to work okay.

However, what is the use case in which someone would want to tunnel bitly URLs through encode.site URLs?

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Thanks for your observation.
As mentioned in the main post, the shortener API which is obviously that of bitly, was included in the process in other to shorten the output base64 string length.
Regards to your question, anyone with base64 workaround could encode any link and use with the platform without the involvement of bitly so far he/she is comfortable with the long strings.

The idea is some sought of “proof of concept” and part of the benefits in using this includes Referrers been cloaked. The bonus bitly API also offered the service was allowing users to track their encoded links.

Though encode.site can be used for lot of other client-side encryptions, but the fore focus is the URL encoding service.

Thanks again, really appreciate your input.

4

I see. In that case, your implementation does what the label says.

However, why are you or anyone trying to cloak referrers? Outside black hat digital advertising, I’m curious to know why anyone would want to cloak/spoof referrers.

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I see. In that case, your implementation does what the label says.

Thanks

I’m curious to know why anyone would want to cloak/spoof referrers.

Saying “cloak” perhaps sounded absurd but its more or less of a stripe and far from spoofing. Facebook, Google and many use this. From “Origin” to “Origin-when-crossorigin”, while encode.site use “none”.
Lets just say as a user, i wouldn’t want a ↓ backlink just yet.