On Thursday, September 14, 2006, 10:24:12 AM, Ron Guerin wrote:
Jeff Chan wrote:
A re-check sounds reasonable. If you'd be doing a large volume of queries you may want to consider using rsynced local versions of the zone files:
Won't be necessary. My redirector is primarily for people to install on their own sites. I run a public copy for the sake of both providing an demonstration, and to get some real-world usage data. I've got hundreds, not hundreds of thousands of URLs from 2 years of operation, at the rate of a few new URLs a day. I had considered slowly re-checking the entire database just to see what turned up, but I decided it wouldn't tell me anything useful to check today's SURBL against submissions made two years ago. I do think that re-checking submissions a few hours after acceptance might be useful. If it is, I'll report that back here.
Sounds reasonable. Please let us know if you find anything of interest.
I can offer the following observation, which is that for a service that's not promoted outside of merely existing on SourceForge, my public redirection service has been primarily discovered by those seeking to conceal their true destination, rather than by those seeking to shorten a URL. Given that my situation is not normal and I've got a relatively small dataset to work with, I'm hesitant to jump to conclusions, but I'd be interested in hearing from other redirector operators about what they're finding out about themselves. From where I'm sitting, it's looking like the bad outweighs the good, substantially.
It definitely seems the case that some redirectors seem heavily abused, though I don't know why.
One of your previous notes was about redirection to other redirector sites, and we've seen that too, sometimes in chains of many redirection steps. Perhaps other redirection sites could/should be disallowed targets in general?
Jeff C. -- Don't harm innocent bystanders.