yeeturl is a privacy-respecting URL shortener that has no way to read your URLs. Your URLs are encrypted with a securely-generated 8 character password in your browser. Even though it has all of these privacy features, it still works the same as other popular services with one big difference - we can’t read your stuff.
I will add the option to make URLs never expire once I’ll be able to afford a big database.
302 redirects are not possible because the server can’t read your URLs (and their passwords). In case you’re wondering, the password and short link are stored after the hash ("#" in the URL), which means they aren’t sent to the server (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URI_fragment#Basics).
That’s actually an issue I’ll have to address soon. Adding metatags would make the encryption pointless as they can’t be added on the client side because very little URL preview apps actually run JavaScript, which means the metatags such as description would need to be stored in plaintext by the server. I believe a good alternative to this would be showing the user where the URL redirects to before performing the redirection.
There isn’t a way to do this without defeating the whole purpose of E2EE. I want the server to never know what people are shortening, and adding metatags from the destination website would require the server to know the password.
Like I said before, such thing is not possible without making the server know (somewhat detailed) information about your URL or password. I’m currently working on a feature where you will be able to see where yeeturl is going to redirect you before it happens.
Can you all explain how the previews should work? I was thinking about some kind of card that displays information about the website extracted from metatags, just like Discord does.
@leeceeksdee
it looks like that the api actually accept links with expiration times =
(Infinity,very large numbers and negative numbers), would you like to add some server side verification of the expiration time? (although actually it expires almost immediately)
It also accepts large expiration times such as this link: yeeturl (expires after 999999 months)
note that I am not going to put this, I’m just saying that there should be some backend thing so people can’t glitch the system and have urls for years.
Can’t you use post or your own slider to achieve this?
Yep. I noticed this too. The shortening of links will be blocked for a few days until this will be resolved. Existing links will continue to work, but I’ll probably delete that link above which expires after a large amount of time (this kind of breaks the terms).
It really depends on your use case - personally, I just use this service to switch between browsing websites on my phone and computer without any intrusive syncing features or a company mining my URLs to “analyze traffic and trends”.
Also, see question 2 in privacy.txt:
We are low on storage space and want to keep our service running properly even if there’s a high demand for it.
Our storage space isn’t extremely low, but I’m sure it will keep on adding up really fast - I’m already getting emails asking if there’s an API available (presumably to use the service for other websites).
The API is very simple to use, but I want to make it easier to understand for people who (for example) don’t have time to look at code or don’t like reverse engineering stuff.