Link shorteners take a long URL and turn it into very short one. They obfuscate the destination URL. This is a problem for us. I have some automated systems running in the background in the forum that will go out and verify that all outbound links are still working, and that they are not in any of the malware distribution blacklists. You might be surprised how many former porn stars had their own websites, left the biz, lost their domain name and someone scooped it up to distribute malware. And there were links to these types of sites buried in old posts.
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