I have noticed the use of shortened links like bit.ly, and goo.gl have increased, for a variety of reasons it is not acceptable to use these links in Ask Ubuntu, here is the question on discussing shortened link services:

How to deal with masked shortened-urls?

Reasons for cleaning these links:

• True location of links are hidden
• Stats and location data is collected (way for spam to track users)
• There are easy ways to "shorten" links with markdown maintaining the orginal link in mouse-over, so the primary purpose of these services is defeated.
• Links are not picked up as "broken" when they lead first to the link shortening service.

So to help facilitate the cleanup of these links to make the site better here is a list of the link services, a link to the AU search for each, and details on how to "safely preview" these links. Here is a article use as source information: How to preview shortened links.

Do not click on shortened links to directly follow!

To clarify, Preview the link to "safely" find the original link, then get rid of the shortened link altogether, aka the original link.

Previewable

• bit.ly: http://askubuntu.com/search?q=bit.ly Add + at end to preview bit.ly/####+ - DONE (only for bit.ly need to expand for other url forms bitly uses, there are many)

• tinyurl.com http://askubuntu.com/search?q=tinyurl.com add preview. at beginning http://preview.tinyurl.com/cz23u4

• goo.gl http://askubuntu.com/search?q=goo.gl add + at end goo.gl/####+

• is.gd http://askubuntu.com/search?q=is.gd add - hyphen at end

• tiny.cc http://askubuntu.com/search?q=tiny.cc add ~ at end

• bitly.com http://askubuntu.com/search?q=bitly.com add +

• j.mp http://askubuntu.com/search?q=j.mp add +

Un-previewable

• t.co http://askubuntu.com/search?q=t.co