Blog

Make clones not war

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Image by Andrew Martin/Pixabay.

Have you already built your perfect short link, with a bunch of UTM parameters and a zillion of smart rules?

Creating and properly configuring a short link can require quite an effort and be time-consuming. And whenever you need to create another, a very similar one, you have to start over again. Annoying, innit? Error-prone, too.

But we hear you! Starting today, any link can be easily cloned, allowing you to modify just the bits you want and to keep the rest as it is.

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Side that bar: navigation unified

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Image by Mocho/Pixabay, with alterations.

As our world’s best link shortener once.to picks up in popularity, we’re observing an ever-increasing share of users accessing our web application using mobile devices: tablets and, mostly, mobile phones.

That’s why we invest heavily into improving overall experience for this vast user group — and today we announce a number of major enhancements to the application navigation.

Meet the new sidebar and responsive tables!

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Sharing is caring

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Photo by Dan Edge/Unsplash.

If you’re using a URL shortener, chances are you share your links a lot. The convenience of sharing is arguably the strongest motivation for shortening links.

Today we introduce an extended set of share buttons, available for everyone on once.to, which include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Telegram, and others.

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Rules revisited

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Our smart link rule editor introduced a while ago, though powerful, may seem unwieldy and overwhelming at first because of all possible criteria displayed at once.

From now on, this will no longer be the case: we’ve refactored the rule editor component hiding away input fields until you actually get to need them.

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URL Explorer

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A brand new tool has landed in once.to: the URL Explorer, a unique combination of power and simplicity that allows anyone to unveil what’s hidden behind the scenes of browsing!

Even better, the tool is free and available for all registered users!

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Enhanced statistics is here

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Image by Clint Post/Pixabay

once.to is back in the new season, with lots of under-the-hood improvements and new exciting plans!

Stats by slug

One of the most wanted features is a new dimension in the link statistics called Domain/slug.

In this mode you get a pie chart that groups all your links by its slug (and domain, if any).

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Redirect unwrapping & Abuse reports

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Photo by Kira auf der Heide/Unsplash.

August is here, and we’re back with a couple of improvements to safeguard once.to’s users against scammers. This comes as a follow-up to our previous post, which highlighted the issue of malicious short links, mostly created by anonymous users.

Redirect unwrapping

The first thing to mention is the so-called link redirect unwrapping technique, which gets applied to all anonymously created links by default.

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How much is the phish?

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Image by Pete Linforth/Pixabay

What a month!

As soon as we went live and started getting user traction, we at once.to got confronted with an unexpected problem.

Pretty soon we’ve discovered that our super-fast, super-convenient short links were actively used by phishers.

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Be social: login via Google, Facebook, Twitter

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Photo by Firmbee/Pixabay.

Signing up with a service is always a bit of a hassle: you need to type in your email, come up with a password, then spend awhile choosing a password that’s actually accepted. Some services would also require you to type your password twice (no idea what for).

Everyone has social network accounts (even when they claim they don’t), so why waste time registering?

As of today, you can now easily log into once.to using your Google, Facebook, or Twitter account!

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