Oh u.nu my friend,
You were the best till the end,
With your case insensitivity.

When I heard you had died I bawled,
As you were the shortest of them all,
With your case insensitivity.

But your beauty was abused,
For the spammers to be amused,
With your case insensitivity.

You could not take much more,
And your parents could not bare it anymore,
So they pulled the plug for your sake,
With your case insensitivity.

You remember your past,
And boy, was it a blast,
With your case insensitivity.

You met friends along the way,
Who were expecting to stay,
As you were open and friendly,
With your case insensitivity.

And now I roam across the web,
To find another love,
Yet nothing fills the void.

RIP unuz :'(

HAHAHAHA
with your case insensitivity xD
all the trolls filling you up

You're no longer able to provide us
and it wasn't your fault
nor we should pay for it
with your case insensitivity...
hahahhaahahhaha!

didn't expect a poem (or something) out of this thread from you. :D
handy service, not like there are u.nu repleacements

epic poem! :D

...and BAH at stripping out the u.nu code :(

I did a little research. If we wanted such a thing replaced there are plenty of similar services. Or BotB could have it's own which makes little sense considering the length of BotB's domain name. Still though, it's meant to conserve space on the IRC. The shortest url would be http://battleofthebits.com/l/x or 30 characters. 'l' would be the BotB directive for 'link' and 'x' is the encoded key to the link target. If BotB opts out of case insensitivity, being case sensitive with key encoding, our number base jumps up to 62 -- which means BotB would be storing 3844 link targets before 'x' becomes three characters long. How many before four characters are necessary? 238,328 link targets. Five characters is over 14 million. Will BotB ever have that many pages?!?!? xD

...if Strobe installed php on rotfl.at I could prolly whip this up in an afternoon, don't even need mysql... I could do it with flat files.

...or we can have huge URLs. ...or I could try bit.ly which gives you usage stats and could also disappear.

anewuser: I know right?

puke7: bit.ly links could disappear, or bit.ly could disapper?

I think setting up our own gig at rotfl.at would be nice.

To be retro, I suggest we use an eight-digit (lowercase; case-insensitivity would be nice) hexadecimal number for each new link. I'm pretty sure we're a good ways off from exhausting that space!

ill try to smack in PHP today when i come home again! :o

While I like the retro idea of a fixed string length using hexadecimal notation, it isn't the most efficient. I mean, if it was 8 character long hex I would want to put a dash in the middle. ;D

There are some factors to consider... If we plan on letting BotBrs use it, I would suggest using a bigger range per character. Even if we go case insensitive it's much larger than hex. I just feel weird calling it a link shortener when all link ID's are 8 characters long. Though, it would give us about 4.29 billion links before we needed to add another one!

We don't need auto-link-shortening in the IRC since TManna takes care of that with tinyurl. However, if BotBrs will be able to API this service, they will need generated keys. Manually shortening links could be done on a certain BotB page. Shortened links can be attributed to BotBr accounts and listed on their profile pages.