Discord Link Shortener

Acco
A link shortener in discord would be great. I know that message id's and the rest of it are fairly long, so it would be nice if there was an inbuilt option in discord to shorten links, could be near the search bar etc
28

Comments

7 comments

Date Votes
  • charitwo
    \+1
    0
  • Angrymouse

    +1

    0
  • zverek

    Currently, the only way to shorten links to Discord messages/channels is to use third-party link shorteners, which open the link in browser instead of in client. It would be really nice to be able to have short links that can stay in-client.

    2
  • myPetWiiUReggie

    Yeah, I think that would be a great idea!

    0
  • Dahrien Cordell (Northshield)

    I can't say whether it's possible or not, using *outside* services' link shorteners. My offhand thought is that it isn't likely too trivial, and *couldn't* work unless the Discord user uses the Discord in-client browser.

    Here's why: The way those typically work is that the shortened links do actually point to website of the shortener service provider, so you need a web browser to access them. Any time their servers get a shortened link, code runs to interpret it, and they redirect the web browser to display the page of the full URL. So from the moment you clicked the shortened link, you are already in the browser environment, outside of the main Discord client app.

    If you use an outside browser, discord has no control over that, and you're stuck.

    Now, if you are using the Discord built-in browser, *AND* Discord decides in the future to reprogram their built-in browser a little bit, they could conceivably have their browser intercept any requests to Discord servers and route you *out* of the browser portion of the app -- to the parts of the Discord app that we'd like to be routed to. ... basically, they have to change their browser to monitor all webpage download requests and handle most of them normally while handling any requests for "Discord server in-message links" (Is that a good way to put it?) by opening to the part of their app that displays stuff on the Discord servers.

    The completely different solution is for Discord to run their own link shortening service just for use within the Discord app, as someone already suggested, with the app testing each link to determine if it should be routed to the shortener or to the web browser. And I would love that, too! To do that would require more storage on their servers, to hold the tables and the code required for the shortening and for processing shortened links. it would also reduce the number of characters used each time a link was repeated. They would have to figure out which way of doing things would wind up using more of their server storage resources (costing them more money, in effect).

    From the outside, I'm all for this latter solution! Pretty please, Discord? 😁

    0
  • Sapicow

    +1 this could be helpful when making toc on a channel

    0
  • Dahrien Cordell (Northshield)

    Yay!  This started happening a while ago now.  Links to messages in channels on the same server, at least, use the channel name as their display text now.  (I don't know about cross-server links or invites; I haven't tried them.)

    0

Please sign in to leave a comment.