Custom Plugins

Decode URLs - A Plugin For Wordpress

TinyURL.com and its competitors are useful sites. They let people convert long URLs into short encoded URLs, and that makes them easier to read in Web posts and in email. But, as nifty as short encoded URLs might, they are also highly dangerous.

For example, a bad guy can easily hide a malicious URL by obscuring it at TinyURL.com. The bad guy might then post it in a comment on your blog. Then later a reader might click on it only to have their computer become infected with who-knows-what kind of malicious software. That’s a bad situation for both the reader and you as a site owner and operator, and it happens frequently out there on the Internet.

Fortunately we came up with a way to help prevent that from happening. Our latest plugin, Decode URLs for Wordpress is a security plugin that filters comments. When someone posts a new comment the plugin finds every occurrence of an encoded URL (if they were encoded at a site such as TinyURL) and decodes them all back to the original URL. That way the initial destination of a URL is always exposed to your readers - assuming the bother to look at it before clicking on it.

So far Decode URLs works to decode URLs that were encoded at any of 6 different URL encoding sites! Others will be added as we become aware of such services.

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