With goo.gl sunset planned for 2025 Aug, when did compiler-explorer start keeping its own database of shortlinks? Can we do anything about old shortlinks? #7719
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https://developers.googleblog.com/en/google-url-shortener-links-will-no-longer-be-available/ says goo.gl shortlinks won't work after August 25th, 2025. godbolt.org currently stores a shortlink database itself, according to https://github.com/compiler-explorer/compiler-explorer/wiki/FAQ But sometime in between, didn't it use JS to have the user's browser shorten and expand links via goo.gl, but display them as godbolt.org/g/whatever? For example, #1334 is a bug report about a problem in that process as recently as 2019. So when did the change happen? How can I check that a shortlink will keep working or not? (Specifically in my Stack Overflow answers and comments; I usually use full links in answers, but there are cases where I didn't. And comments of course never have room for full links. But anyway, that means I know the approximate creation time of each shortlink, if there's a time window.) Is clicking on an old shortlink enough to get its expansion into the godbolt.org database? Oh, did we change from #889 is about replacing goo.gl - it talks about getting a list of all shortened links, but says "Seems Google will be keeping them "forever", so we can always cache them in our own solution as we resolve them", which seems not to be true anymore. So what's the status there, does opening a link get it "cached" permanently? |
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Replies: 5 comments 13 replies
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So; yes:
Anything Anything You're right about #889 (and #1334 though I thought that's now working). I will trawl our web logs and look for all the |
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Ok, so
Great, that would be cool if existing links can keep working, even if it means we have to visit those links sometime between now and August to get them into the logs. When you've looked into and come up with something, it would be useful to know:
I mentioned it only because it shows we were still using |
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I'm able to go over our last 90 days of logs, and got 12k unique google links. I'm now in the process of archiving those to a (private!) sqlite database, and I'll start using that in preference of google. I'll keep periodically updating the database with more recent logs until the cut-off date. So, clicking on the links will make them appear in my list. That said, if you have a list of links yourself you can share with me I can manually add them to a list of links to preserve. If you point me at SO's search I can probably finagle it myself. Unfortunately we only keep 90d of logs for privacy reasons, so I don't have anything earlier than that, and creating the links never showed up in the logs either. Thanks for raising this to our attention! |
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https://stackexchange.com/search?q=%22godbolt.org%2Fg%2F%22 finds 603 posts (just questions and answers, not comments) across the Stack Exchange network which contain the text I didn't get any matches for I don't think this search matches subdomains like rust.godbolt.org. I couldn't get a wildcard to work when testing it with /z/ links and the Usually when people post shortlinks, they're just bare links, not Most of the hits are on the main Stack Overflow site, but some are on Russian SO (https://ru.stackoverflow.com/), and a few are on https://codereview.stackexchange.com/ and others. I don't know an automated way to get a list of godbolt.org links that only appear in comments; Stack Overflow treats comments as less valuable so they're not searchable. For my own comments at least I'll use google. Fortunately my last name is uncommon so I can use it. I use full-links in my answers, only short links in comments, but a lot of people do use shortlinks even in posts so at least making sure those stay alive is good. Thanks for taking the time to work on this. |
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Thanks @pcordes -- I'm currently working on crawling using Google's APIs and github and a few others to try and find them. I'll see what I can do with SO's APIs too. I'll keep you posted! Cheers, Matt! |
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Looks like we can get data from : https://archive.org/details/stackexchange |
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In terms of timings, looks like: around March 2016 is when we started using |
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The "fix" for this is now live:
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On a separate and unrelated note: Thank you so much @pcordes for all the illuminating and clearly written answers you give on SO. You're a treasure and very much appreciated. I know when I see an answer by you it's going to be a good one :) |
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More details at: https://xania.org/202505/compiler-explorer-urls-forever |
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Archiveteam has recently brute-forced the ID space and saved every goo.gl link, so if in the future you get a request to It might be a bad idea to do that automatically as part of handling /g/ requests, but if you're logging failed requests maybe you could periodically go through the list and see if it's archived? |
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Oh that's amazing!!! Thanks both |
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I'm able to go over our last 90 days of logs, and got 12k unique google links. I'm now in the process of archiving those to a (private!) sqlite database, and I'll start using that in preference of google.
I'll keep periodically updating the database with more recent logs until the cut-off date. So, clicking on the links will make them appear in my list.
That said, if you have a list of links yourself you can share with me I can manually add them to a list of links to preserve. If you point me at SO's search I can probably finagle it myself.
Unfortunately we only keep 90d of logs for privacy reasons, so I don't have anything earlier than that, and creating the links never showed up in the …