We have endured many problem with tinyurls on Facebook. Links don't always do what they say and scam artists take advantage of that. With the growing popularity of the Link-a-Nator we also saw that many url shortening services couldn't keep up with the demands. Team Spockholm came up with a solution to both of these problems by creating their own url shortening service called spockon.me. It was first introduced into the Mission Crew Link bookmarklet
(1).
Then it was incorporated into the Operation-a-Nator bookmarklet
(1)
Today Team Spockholm announced in
this post that it has been incorporated into the Link-a-Nator.
You can see that Spockon option at the bottom of the Lik-a-Nator and it will be the default setting. This is by far the safest method of shortening links because it will only create shorter urls if the original link comes from Mafia Wars. Mission Crew and Brazil Crew options were also added in the General Links section. From now on, I will only click on spockon.me links.
Once you run the Link-a-Nator, you can post your new and cool spockon.me links to your wall.
Since spockon.me was added to the Link-a-Nator over 30,000 spockon.me links were generated in the first hour alone. Hopefully Eike will write a cool statistics post for us in the future. For now just remember if your link doesn't say spockon.me it may not be a Mafia Wars related link.
"Links don't always do what they say and scam artists take advantage of that."
ReplyDeleteDon't mean to be rude, but have you never heard of link preview? Tinyurl has it, Bit.ly has it..
Does spockon.me have it or do I have to trust spockholm that nothing goes wrong (servers get hacked all the time.. injection being quite easy)?
don't mean to be rude (lol), but above comment is kind of a ridiculous argument for not using spockon.me.
ReplyDeletefirst, most people open more than a hundred tiny links a day, previewing every single one would add so much time and hassle to the process. i already spend enough hours a day playing this darn game.
and worrying about the spockon.me server being hacked is kind of a moot point, since any server on the internet can be hacked if someone has enough time and motivation, so why make it a point for this one? but would someone really spend that much time and motivation trying to hack spockon.me just so they can hijack some tiny redirects that only a small group uses (relatively compared to all mafia wars players, or even to all tinyurl.com users in general)? if they're going to put in that much effort, they'll probably be targeting your bank account instead.
Well said anonymous #2. Some are just bitter that gift links are going to show where they were generated from and all those other programs will have to admit to using Spockholm as their "reference guide".
ReplyDeleteWow.. is this spockholm fan club or a blog? If I would have said something against Zynga instead, everyone would be all ok with it.. What's this bitter talk? Real mature response to bit of criticism.. I have nothing against spockholm. I wasn't bashing spockholm or spockon.me. I was bashing that one part of post that I quoted.. I have nothing against spockholm tools, I use some of them (but mostly there are better alternatives for my specific needs). I agree with other parts of post like tinyurl/bit.ly being overloaded and are often used for scams, but come on.. If you get scammed because of tinyurl or bit.ly link then it is your fault. "I click too many links" is not an excuse.. That's the point I was trying to make.. Now go ahead and read this post wrong too and make yourself look even more silly..
ReplyDeleteThe posting of gift links using the TinyUrl service existed long before Spockholm came out with Link-a-Nator and there exist many bookmarklets that have been created to handle them, each in different ways. It is wrong to say that they are all copying Spockholm!
ReplyDeleteThe people objecting to these new links are concerned that this will break their favorite bookmarklets, and this WILL cause those bookmarklets to have to be updated to find the new Spockon.me links.
That is no big deal, however. I've already updated mine. And it will solve the issues with tinyurls.
The original commenter does have a point regarding the preview utility that has not been included in spockon.me (yet?). Someone with the motivation to do so could theoretically do as he is describes, but as other posters mentioned, there are definitely bigger markets to target if you were going to invest your time in hacking something...
ReplyDeleteAs of now, I don't click very many links outside of using the Get-a-nator from time to time. I preview all of my bit/tinyurl links because you can never be too careful. I like the work you guys are doing with your spockholm apps, keep up the great work!
As for concerns with this potentially "breaking" others bookmarklets, I assume those at spockholm created this service to take the load off of other services (tinyurl bit.ly, etc), and programmed it with the intention that it would work with the bookmarklets that they create. I fail to see why spockholm should concern themselves with people objecting because its not working with their current bookmarklet that they've created/ use, as it was not designed to do so.
Manual creation of links has existed prior to us. Manual creation of links still exists.
ReplyDeleteYou can even Link-a-nator to still bit.ly and tinyurl so all we have done is encourage a more stable and filtered url system using the spockon service. The system is designed to only handle MW urls. Unlike the tiny and bitly service. You want a preview save them as a tiny or bitly. I am not going to preview over 200 gifts that is rather ridiculous. I would rather like to know the url is only a MW url.
Maybe you should.. http://spockon.me/EG1
ReplyDelete(Don't worry.. it only takes you to robbing page)
If a preview option is wanted, we can do that. No problem.
ReplyDeleteMW LOOTLADY,
ReplyDeleteHow to get my mafia page look like yours? I mean "Link-A-Nator v2.07 Beta" ??