"Jens Krueger" wrote in message
...
[...]
makeashorterlink.com specifically says in their
FAQ that, as long as they are around, their links will work.

...that could be significantly shorter than "forever". ;-)

It could well match the lifetime of the Internet, for all we know. My point
is that there's no reason to believe that the shortcut web sites will have a
shorter lifetime than the Usenet archives or other related resources.

Anyways, my point was that introducing link-hosts should not be the cure
for broken newsreader, like the response to the OP suggested.

Perhaps not. But even the person saying that we shouldn't work around
broken newsreaders (you) apparently has a broken newsreader (your
formatted URL come through with a line break).

makeashortlink.com shows you the target URL before redirecting you. It
doesn't make links as short as tinyurl.com, but they are short enough and
IMHO do address the line-break issue, and make the post more readable anyway
(to a human being, often the only part of the URL really useful is the
domain...one could just put that seperately -- "From foo.com:" -- and use
the shorter link service).

I just don't see what you have against the services. Your original
complaint was that the redirects go out of date, but they don't. Now your
complaint seems to be that we ought to all just be using newsreaders that
aren't "broken", but your own newsreader appears to be as well.

Pete