[kwlug-disc] Link shortener advice

[Paul Nijjar]

I am running into link shortener issues again. In fact, the link
shortener issues never really went away. 

I have been using da.gd, which is open source but gets flagged by a
bunch of mail scanning systems because spammers can make those links
easily. 

I think I probably have to go with one of the gross big players like
bit.ly, because it is big enough that the spam filters will not block
it automatically. (But every bit.ly link will probably increase the
spam score of a message.) There are also big link rot issues here. 

I am thinking of self-hosting an open source link shortener, but there
are dozens out there and most of them look like security nightmares
(in the sense that I do not know whether they address security issues
at all, and they are mostly written in PHP). Some popular ones are: 

https://lessnmore.net/
https://project.polr.me/
https://yourls.org/
https://shlink.io/

but there are a tonne of other ones. I have not evaluated any in depth
yet, and I am sufficiently time-crunched these days that doing so is
feeling overwhelming.

Here are the features I want: 

- Easy to install if I have my own domain
- Cares about security
- Ideally, minimal functionality. I need: 
  + The ability to shorten a URL
  + The ability to take a shortened URL and expand it
  + Some kind of API or password protection so that arbitrary spammers
  cannot use the service 
  + The ability to call an API from my Python scripts

Most of these shorteners want to do a bunch of surveillance and custom
URLs and other toolkit things (da.gd is a good example of this. It is
kind of neat, but I worry about allowing all that functionality). I do
not really care whether the shortener wants to do surveillance
provided that I do not need to look at them. 

Here are my questions: 

- Does anybody have a particular open source self-hosted solution to
  recommend?
- Does anybody have guidance on which way I should go, and what the
  best practices would be? This is for KWLUG and Watcamp, so I do not
  want to pay for a monthly service. (Surprise, surprise.) But I also
  want my emails to get through and people to be able to click links.




- Paul


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