The URL shortener that makes your links look as suspicious as possible

There may actually be some utility here. LLM agents refuse to traverse the links. Tested with gemini-3-pro, gpt-5.2, and opus 4.5.

edit: gpt-oss 20B & 120B both eagerly visit it.

Related: A URL shortener not shortening the URL but makes it look very dodgy (434 points, 2023, 100 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34609461

My favorite link of all time:

https://jpmorgan.c1ic.link/logger_zcGFC2_bank_xss.docm

Definitely not meta

Hole in one!

I shortened a link and when trying to access it in Chrome I get a red screen with this message:

  Dangerous site
  Attackers on the site you tried visiting might trick you into installing software or revealing things like your passwords, phone, or credit card numbers. Chrome strongly recommends going back to safety.

I think it’s perfectly reasonable to make something useless for fun, it’s an interesting idea.

But what I’d like to understand is why there are so many of the same thing. I know I’ve seen this exact idea multiple times on HN. It’s funny the first time, but once it’s done once and the novelty is gone (which is almost immediately), what’s the point of another and another and another?

IIRC, shadyurl was the original version of this. Doesn't seem to be around anymore, though.

What's up with the creepy ads on this website? It seems like they are actually sketchy ads and not just fake ads for comedic effect. One shows some scammy nonsense about your device being infected and the other links to a real VPN app.

Please don’t use 3rd party relays for your URLs. It’s bad enough to have your own server, domain, etc. as single points of failure and bottlenecks without adding a 3rd party into the mix, who either themselves or someone that takes over their domain later track users, randomly redirect your users to a malicious site, or just fail.

I know people have fond memories of long ago when they thought surely some big company’s URL shortener would never be taken down and learned from that when it later was.

I'm not sure what the use case for this is, but I've been using it as a inefficient messaging service with my girlfriend, ie:

https://c1ic.link/campaign_WxjLdF_login_page_2.bat

You seem to be able to encode arbitrary text, so long as it follows [A-Za-z0-9]+\.[A-Za-z0-9]+

I would also like to have something like this, but for "vintage" links - something that looks like it was from the late 90s.

I use them in tests, just for fun: https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/blob/master/tests/q...

BRILLIANT! Even Chrome says nope/DANGEROUS to a creepified link to mail.google.com

Fantastic! I miss the original ShadyURL.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31386108

Saw this on relaunched Digg and figured HN would appreciate it.

I wouldn't call it a shortener, since most of the links it creates are longer than the originals.

What would be a good name here? A URL redirector?

This is legit! If you disable your adblock you even get a suspicious ad

I can't tell if the website works as advertised because I don't want to open the generated links

This is fun. Is it not checking for previously submitted URLs though? I can seemingly re-submit the exact same URL and get a new link every time. I would expect this to fill the database unnecessarily but I have no idea how the backend works.

It would've been top-notch if it actually sometimes just used Outlook/O365 or similar vendor's "safelinks" redirector that they use.

Yeah but have fun explaining yourself to the police when the author abandons the project and an actual scammer ends up buying up all those domains.

Every URL shortener is suspicious.

While this seems like it would make it harder for them I wouldn't be surprised if scammers eventually try to abuse this service too and I have no doubt that people would happily click these if they found in them in a phishing email, that said I give the folks behind this a lot of credit for having a way to contact them and report links if that happens.

My city utility provider used secured-server.biz for billing for a long time. I always thought it was hilarious and very suspicious looking.

I like how old-school HN comment section does not care about creepy links at all. Or link for that matter.

This is great. It created a link to my personal site that Firefox blocked me from going to.

This is cool, since the links are actually short, but for properly suspicious links I prefer phishyurl [1] .

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45295898

edit: fixed typo

Just wondering. so you bought c1ic.link and web-safe.link. That's very cool

This is the best article on Wikipedia!

https://c1ic.link/bzSBpN_login_page_2

Edit: Chrome on Android warned me not to visit the site!

As someone who built a standard shortener (coz.jp), this is hilarious. I spent so much time trying to make links look trustworthy; doing the exact opposite is a surprisingly fun concept.

The other day in a Facebook Messenger group chat I tried to link to https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ as a joke, but Messenger kept blocking it. It's quite overzealous with its blocking.

Haha, it's fun. Just thinking, is there some place where creepy links would be better ?

I am sharing content using these creepy links to send to office people.

Please take my upvote. :)

Firefox is freaking out on some of these. It's hilarious.

/instagram.c1ic.link/mCLIIp_free_vacation_offer.zip

It's so creepy my corporate VPN blocked it

Use case? Besides humor and phishing tests

I can just say thanks

why do creepy links look creepy?...

Add this to "HN for psychopaths" please.

Imagine someone compromises apps like these and replaces the creepy looking links to actually dangerous links

It is hilarious and i'm not clicking any link lol.

lol, I'm not clicking a .vbs link

Hole in one!

I shortened a link and when trying to access it in Chrome I get a red screen with this message:

  Dangerous site
  Attackers on the site you tried visiting might trick you into installing software or revealing things like your passwords, phone, or credit card numbers. Chrome strongly recommends going back to safety.

Related: A URL shortener not shortening the URL but makes it look very dodgy (434 points, 2023, 100 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34609461

That's less a URL shortener and more a URL dodgifier.

The key point here is "not shortening"

My favorite link of all time:

https://jpmorgan.c1ic.link/logger_zcGFC2_bank_xss.docm

Definitely not meta

I got one where the called script ended in ".pl" and I had a flashback to the 90s. My trousers grew into JNCOs, Limp Bizkit started playing out of nowhere and I got a massive urge to tell Slashdot that Alan Thicke had died.

With Firefox on Android it simply says

Deceptive site issue

This web page at [...] has been reported as a deceptive site and has been blocked based on your security preferences.

What's going on? I can't find any setting to disable this.

Imagine using this as your personal website lol

There may actually be some utility here. LLM agents refuse to traverse the links. Tested with gemini-3-pro, gpt-5.2, and opus 4.5.

edit: gpt-oss 20B & 120B both eagerly visit it.

I wish this came a day earlier.

There is a current "show your personal site" post on top of HN [1] with 1500+ comments. I wonder how many of those sites are or will be hammered by AI bots in the next few days to steal/scrape content.

If this can be used as a temporary guard against AI bots, that would have been a good opportunity to test it out.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46618714

LLM led scraping might not as it requires an LLM to make a choice to kick it off, but crawling for the purpose of training data is unlikely to be affected.

Sounds like a useful signal for people building custom agents or models. Being able to control whether automated systems follow a link via metadata is an interesting lever, especially given how inconsistent current model heuristics are.

I can confirm Mistral refuse to traverse the links

IIRC, shadyurl was the original version of this. Doesn't seem to be around anymore, though.

shadyurl a whole bunch of different incredibly shady domains that were used at random. it was beautiful.

I think it’s perfectly reasonable to make something useless for fun, it’s an interesting idea.

I think it's just someone learning something new most of the time.

I have home made url shorteners in go, rust, java, python, php, elixir, typescript, etc. why? because I'm trying the language and this kind of project touches on many things: web, databases, custom logic, how and what design patterns can I apply using as much of the language as I can to build the thing.

I’ve been browsing this site for a decade plus and this idea was new to me. Maybe the author is in the same boat.

Edit: I see referencnes to shadyurl in the comments and I have heard of that, but probably wouldn’t have thought of it.

A fun project doesn't need to be original, IMO.

URL Shortener is still one of the most popular System Design questions, building this project is a great way to have some experience / understanding of it, for example.

I actually forgot that this had been done before until you mentioned it.

Giving the author the benefit of the doubt, they may have not seen it before, or was bored and just wanted to make a toy.

And it seems like many in HN are in enough a similar boat to me to have up voted it to trending, so at least some people found it entertaining, so it fulfilled its purpose I suppose.

It's a good question though, and I don't think anyone really knows the answer.

The author posted this project on reddit a few days ago where they mentioned their motivation: "I have a coworker who is constantly talking about the glory days of ShadyUrl, but that website has been down for several years at this point, so I figured I would create an alternative."

One reason is that not all these websites manage to make equally "creepy" links, even though the basic idea is the same. I remember one version which was a lot more alarming than the current example, with links containing a mix of suspicious content hinting at viruses, phishing, piracy/warez sites, pornography (XXX cams), and Bitcoin scams. I don't remember that website, but the current case seems rather weak by comparison.

I know people have fond memories of long ago when they thought surely some big company’s URL shortener would never be taken down and learned from that when it later was.

This! I've run into very frustrating examples of legit sites doing that, for no defensible reason at all.

For example, the healthcare.gov emails. For links to that domain, they would still transform them with lnks.gd, even though:

1) The emails would be very long and flashy, so they're clearly not economizing on space.

2) The "shortened" URL was usually longer!

3) That domain doesn't let you go straight to the root and check where the transformed URL is going.

It's training users to do the very things that expose them to scammers!

https://jpmorgan.web-safe.link/flash_7KzCZd_money_request

I love this version and I hope you do too.

That's just the ambient creepiness of the internet. It's a creepy place!

This is probably the result of a context based ad network serving sketchy adds because of the suspicious url content.

BRILLIANT! Even Chrome says nope/DANGEROUS to a creepified link to mail.google.com

I can't tell if the website works as advertised because I don't want to open the generated links

This is legit! If you disable your adblock you even get a suspicious ad

Yeah but have fun explaining yourself to the police when the author abandons the project and an actual scammer ends up buying up all those domains.

My city utility provider used secured-server.biz for billing for a long time. I always thought it was hilarious and very suspicious looking.

It would've been top-notch if it actually sometimes just used Outlook/O365 or similar vendor's "safelinks" redirector that they use.

This is great. It created a link to my personal site that Firefox blocked me from going to.

Every URL shortener is suspicious.

I like how old-school HN comment section does not care about creepy links at all. Or link for that matter.

Just wondering. so you bought c1ic.link and web-safe.link. That's very cool

This is cool, since the links are actually short, but for properly suspicious links I prefer phishyurl [1] .

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45295898

edit: fixed typo

Saw this on relaunched Digg and figured HN would appreciate it.

Digg is back?

Edit: looks like you need an invite code.

Bummer

I don't appreciate how AI generated this website looks.

Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time

Am I missing something, or would these essentially be implemented via DNS records? It's not clear to me that keeping the links in a database would be necessary at all (unless the DNS records are what you mean by "database")

I got https://microsoft.web-safe.link/cZ17Xn_claim_gift_card.msi for this article. What do you get?

I wouldn't call it a shortener, since most of the links it creates are longer than the originals.

What would be a good name here? A URL redirector?

It's an asymptotic link shortener

Same here I took a six character url, and it turned into at least ten.

I added google.com and it spit out https://twitterDOTc1icDOTlink/install_Jy7NpK_private_videoDOTzip

Interesting that it spit out a .zip url. Was not expecting that so I changed all the “.” to “DOT” so I don’t get punished for posting a spammy link despite this literally being a website to make links as spammy and creepy as possible.

I'm not sure what the use case for this is, but I've been using it as a inefficient messaging service with my girlfriend, ie:

https://c1ic.link/campaign_WxjLdF_login_page_2.bat

You seem to be able to encode arbitrary text, so long as it follows [A-Za-z0-9]+\.[A-Za-z0-9]+

Fantastic! I miss the original ShadyURL.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31386108

Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time

Digg is back?

Edit: looks like you need an invite code.

Bummer

I don't appreciate how AI generated this website looks.

It seems appropriate that, for a website whose purpose is to make links which raise your suspicions, the visual design itself also raises your suspicions.

Just looks like every other generic framework oriented site.

which bit are you getting an AI smell from?

It's an asymptotic link shortener

Same here I took a six character url, and it turned into at least ten.

As someone who built a standard shortener (coz.jp), this is hilarious. I spent so much time trying to make links look trustworthy; doing the exact opposite is a surprisingly fun concept.

This is the best article on Wikipedia!

https://c1ic.link/bzSBpN_login_page_2

Edit: Chrome on Android warned me not to visit the site!

I can just say thanks

I am sharing content using these creepy links to send to office people.

Please take my upvote. :)

Firefox is freaking out on some of these. It's hilarious.

The other day in a Facebook Messenger group chat I tried to link to https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ as a joke, but Messenger kept blocking it. It's quite overzealous with its blocking.

Add this to "HN for psychopaths" please.

why do creepy links look creepy?...

lol, I'm not clicking a .vbs link

I actually forgot that this had been done before until you mentioned it.

Giving the author the benefit of the doubt, they may have not seen it before, or was bored and just wanted to make a toy.

And it seems like many in HN are in enough a similar boat to me to have up voted it to trending, so at least some people found it entertaining, so it fulfilled its purpose I suppose.

It's a good question though, and I don't think anyone really knows the answer.

It seems appropriate that, for a website whose purpose is to make links which raise your suspicions, the visual design itself also raises your suspicions.

DNS is only for resolving the host part. The path is not passing through a dns query.

In example.com/blah, the /blah part is interpreted by the host itself.

And apart from that I would indeed consider DNS records a database.

I got https://microsoft.web-safe.link/cZ17Xn_claim_gift_card.msi for this article. What do you get?

Just resubmit it, you'll probably get a new link. I get something different every time.

Haha, it's fun. Just thinking, is there some place where creepy links would be better ?

Use case? Besides humor and phishing tests

I’ve been browsing this site for a decade plus and this idea was new to me. Maybe the author is in the same boat.

Edit: I see referencnes to shadyurl in the comments and I have heard of that, but probably wouldn’t have thought of it.

A fun project doesn't need to be original, IMO.

URL Shortener is still one of the most popular System Design questions, building this project is a great way to have some experience / understanding of it, for example.

I would also like to have something like this, but for "vintage" links - something that looks like it was from the late 90s.

I use them in tests, just for fun: https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/blob/master/tests/q...

I added google.com and it spit out https://twitterDOTc1icDOTlink/install_Jy7NpK_private_videoDOTzip

The key point here is "not shortening"

It's so creepy my corporate VPN blocked it

It is hilarious and i'm not clicking any link lol.

/instagram.c1ic.link/mCLIIp_free_vacation_offer.zip

I can confirm Mistral refuse to traverse the links

shadyurl a whole bunch of different incredibly shady domains that were used at random. it was beautiful.

Just looks like every other generic framework oriented site.

Imagine someone compromises apps like these and replaces the creepy looking links to actually dangerous links

LLM led scraping might not as it requires an LLM to make a choice to kick it off, but crawling for the purpose of training data is unlikely to be affected.

https://jpmorgan.web-safe.link/flash_7KzCZd_money_request

I love this version and I hope you do too.

This! I've run into very frustrating examples of legit sites doing that, for no defensible reason at all.

For example, the healthcare.gov emails. For links to that domain, they would still transform them with lnks.gd, even though:

1) The emails would be very long and flashy, so they're clearly not economizing on space.

2) The "shortened" URL was usually longer!

3) That domain doesn't let you go straight to the root and check where the transformed URL is going.

It's training users to do the very things that expose them to scammers!

I've been at a company that internally sends out fake links that log the user and links to an educational page on internet safety.

I honestly don't mind too much since it's a once a year thing (hacktober) and honestly companies should be trying to catch out employees who click any and all links.

I think Microsoft have their own version of this

Msn.com Office.com Sharepoint.com Hotmail.com Etc, plus all the subdomains they insert before them. It makes it very easy to create phishing emails that look plausible.

Fair. I’d think they would look for prior work beforehand, but that’s perfectly valid.

https://xkcd.com/1053/

Again, this was not a criticism, but a genuine question.

> A fun project doesn't need to be original, IMO.

I agree. But a URL shortener with a twist isn’t just fun, it’s funny. The joke—as opposed to the usefulness—is what’s interesting about it. But when the same joke is overdone, it’s no longer funny.

> building this project is a great way to have some experience / understanding of it

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46632329

Thought this might be it... I clicked it anyways haha. I will need to update the Rick roll url on my nfc implant with this new link!

There was a "shadyurl". The site itself seems to be long gone, but this'll give you some context: https://www.mikelacher.com/work/shady-url/

That's less a URL shortener and more a URL dodgifier.

To be fair, the one in the OP also did not shorten any of the links I gave it.

With Firefox on Android it simply says

Deceptive site issue

This web page at [...] has been reported as a deceptive site and has been blocked based on your security preferences.

What's going on? I can't find any setting to disable this.

NextDNS is blocking it too (https://google.c1ic.link/lottery_qrdLCz_account_verification). The reason is that Google Safe Browsing considers that site as unsafe.

I was able to get past that (Firefox on the Desktop) by clicking the "see details" button and then clicking the "ignore the risk" link. It took me a while to actually read the text too.

which bit are you getting an AI smell from?

gradient background, card, button

I wish this came a day earlier.

If this can be used as a temporary guard against AI bots, that would have been a good opportunity to test it out.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46618714

Imagine using this as your personal website lol

I think it's just someone learning something new most of the time.

This is probably the result of a context based ad network serving sketchy adds because of the suspicious url content.

DNS is only for resolving the host part. The path is not passing through a dns query.

In example.com/blah, the /blah part is interpreted by the host itself.

And apart from that I would indeed consider DNS records a database.

That's just the ambient creepiness of the internet. It's a creepy place!

AI bots (or clients claiming to be one) appear quite fast on new sites, at least that's what I saw recently in few places. They probably monitor Certificate Transparency logs - you won't hide by avoiding linking. Unless you are ok with staying in the shadow of naked http.

I posted my site on the thread.

My site is hosted on Cloudflare and I trust its protection way more than flavor of the month method. This probably won't be patched anytime soon but I'd rather have some people click my link and not just avoid it along with AI because it looks fishy :)

Glad I’m not the only one who felt icky seeing that post.

I agree my tinfoil hat signal told me this was the perfect way to ask people for bespoke, hand crafted content - which of course AI will love to slurp up to keep feeding the bear.

I think that something specifically intended for this, like Anubis, is a much better option.

How is AI viewing content any different from Google? I don’t even use Google anymore because it’s so filled with SEO trash as to be useless for many things.

Of course, the downside is that people might not even see your site at all because they’re afraid to click on that suspicious link.

Right. But the question is why redo the exact same joke? Why not come up with another twist (like the URL lengthener) or do no twist but be useful?

I’m not criticising the author or anyone who came before. I’m trying to understand the impetus between redoing a joke that isn’t yours. You don’t learn anything new by redoing the exact same gag that you wouldn’t learn by being even slightly original or making the project truly useful.

Ideas are a dime a dozen. You could make e.g. a Fonzie URL shortener (different lengths of “ayyyyy”), or an interstellar one (each is the name of a space object), or a binary one (all ones and zeroes)… Each of those would take about the same effort and teach you the same, but they’re also different enough they would make some people remember them, maybe even look at the author and their other projects, instead of just “oh, another one of these, close”.

That makes it even more confusing. If you’re making something creepy, I can see the argument for “whatever exists isn’t creepy enough, I’ll do it better” but not the reverse.

Just resubmit it, you'll probably get a new link. I get something different every time.

Thought this might be it... I clicked it anyways haha. I will need to update the Rick roll url on my nfc implant with this new link!

> A fun project doesn't need to be original, IMO.

> building this project is a great way to have some experience / understanding of it

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46632329

I've been at a company that internally sends out fake links that log the user and links to an educational page on internet safety.

I honestly don't mind too much since it's a once a year thing (hacktober) and honestly companies should be trying to catch out employees who click any and all links.

We used to have fun hammering millions of requests to such URLs from a VPS when they would send such emails to role mailboxes.

Eventually we got asked to please make it stop. I asked them to please stop sending fake phishing emails to robots.

I think Microsoft have their own version of this

Msn.com Office.com Sharepoint.com Hotmail.com Etc, plus all the subdomains they insert before them. It makes it very easy to create phishing emails that look plausible.

Fair. I’d think they would look for prior work beforehand, but that’s perfectly valid.

https://xkcd.com/1053/

Again, this was not a criticism, but a genuine question.

There was a "shadyurl". The site itself seems to be long gone, but this'll give you some context: https://www.mikelacher.com/work/shady-url/

microsoftonline.com is one of my favorites. Like how can you look any more scammy :D

I can’t speak for the author, but this strikes me as the kind of thing you might not want to check prior work on. It just seems like a fun little project and sometimes seeing that other people have done it can be a bit demotivating.

There's an example shadyurl link in here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14628529

Funnily enough the domains appear to have been bought up and are now genuinely shady.

I was able to get past that (Firefox on the Desktop) by clicking the "see details" button and then clicking the "ignore the risk" link. It took me a while to actually read the text too.

NextDNS is blocking it too (https://google.c1ic.link/lottery_qrdLCz_account_verification). The reason is that Google Safe Browsing considers that site as unsafe.

TBF it ought to trigger even the simplest heuristics so it wouldn't surprise me if it was automatically categorized that way.

gradient background, card, button

To be fair, the one in the OP also did not shorten any of the links I gave it.

Perhaps, but nearly every tutorial in all the modern frameworks demonstrate this exact style.

Have you looked at a website in the last 10 years?

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Hacker Times

The URL shortener that makes your links look as suspicious as possible

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