periods in URLs where they don't belong

[conception_native_0123]

I've seen this go on now for quite some time. I took the pictures below with the win snippet tool. the first one shows the link address behind an image on a webpage and the 2nd one shows a youtube link sent to me from an iPhone. has anyone ever seen this before? if so, what causes it? when I click the links I always go to the appropriate address that has no period in it:

 

[plog]

It's called a redirect. You enter one address and the url at the end of it sends you to another.

mailchimp.com owns the domain mailchi.mp
You enter mailchi.mp/something into your browser it hits mailchi.mp/something and the webserver there redirects you to mailchimp.com/something

Try it:

Turn emails into revenue | Mailchimp

Win new customers with the #1 email marketing and automations platform that recommends ways to get more opens, clicks, and sales.

mailchi.mp

 

[conception_native_0123]

I took a look at that page plog, and it doesn't say anything about that marketing technique. maybe it shouldn't though. that's internal tools. it looks to me to be a way to get around your own mail getting flagged as spam by the server looking at links in the message. could that be so? if that is NOT so, I don't understand the point of it. why issue a redirect at all? what is it supposed to help with? what's the ""big idea"" about it, if you don't mind me asking?

 

[plog]

It wasn't an explanation it was an example.

I posted this url:

https://mailchi.mp

But when you click it look at your browser it will show this:

https://mailchimp.com

 

[The_Doc_Man]

why issue a redirect at all?

Using a "redirect" allows multiple machines to intercept traffic when there is implied extra work in the process and someone wants to distribute the load. For instance, Windows has this thing called a "Wolfpack cluster" that allows multiple machines to manage web sites as though it was a single, much more powerful machine. The redirect occurs such that some machine responds to the literal redirect address but then does something with it, maybe like a round-robin scheduler, to pass the traffic to each of the "background" machines in turn. It's a load-balancing tool.

It is also a way to pre-screen mail for viral implications or SPAM. It can also be a routing tool, where a site has an outside network and an inside network, with the redirecting machine being at the boundary between inside and outside. The U.S. Navy had this for the purpose of hiding the structure of the inside network because nobody could directly browse it without being logged in to the boundary machine first. And it was the home of one of our better firewalls.

 

[conception_native_0123]

yes plog, I get the example. I guess I'm looking for the POINT of it. there doesn't seem to be one. Is there a wiki page on this subject? wiki and bookmark?

 

[conception_native_0123]

so, according to richard, I was right, or could have been, about it being a spam blocking tool. now I get it. a load balancing tool. that makes perfect sense, actually. I would assume that load balancing is a necessary part of corporate IT work nowadays, right?

 

[plog]

it looks cooler:

youtube.com
youtu.be

Now the company name is the entire url, no extra characters

 

[conception_native_0123]

Now the company name is the entire url, no extra characters

maybe it is showing off the extra chars at the end of the string. in this case, it is "be". mailchip = "ip"! cool! lol

 

[The_Doc_Man]

I would assume that load balancing is a necessary part of corporate IT work nowadays, right?

Load balancing is, indeed, a necessary part of corporate work. Also load distribution, if you consider virtual operating systems that are bound on one "core" of a multi-core VM processor. I ran a 4-node asymmetric cluster once (but not for Windows - it was OpenVMS). We load-balanced by putting the production traffic on the strongest node, the development on one weak node, the testing on a middling node, and system overhead jobs on the other weak node. Yet each machine could see the other machine. The batch system sent jobs based on where things went. Our users just logged where the net redirect proxy sent them because their production jobs went through the batch system, which redirected loads where they needed to be. (That didn't last forever, because at our next upgrade, we had symmetric nodes and didn't care where anything ran, but we still used the redirect proxy to pick one of the three systems in round-robin order for each login.