On 2026-05-20 at 14:41:04 UTC-0400 (Wed, 20 May 2026 18:41:04 +0000)
Kent Oyer <[email protected]>
is rumored to have said:
Is the ultimate goal to replace the DecodeShortURLs plugin with the
Redirectors plugin? It seems like Redirectors was forked from
DecodeShortURLs in 2024 and new features have been added to
Redirectors but not much has changed in DecodeShortURLs.
That's very odd. I don't recall that being discussed at all, and I can't
find any discussion or the commit email creating Redirectors.pm in the
archives. I had not realized that we were handling these as distinct
things.
The problem I'm seeing is that Redirectors runs at priority -15 and
DecodeShortURLs runs at priority -10. So a chain like:
REDIRECTOR -> SHORTENER -> target
gets fully traversed, but a chain like:
SHORTENER -> REDIRECTOR -> target
does not. The only feature I can find in DecodeShortURLs that's not in
Redirectors is url_shortener_custom_user_agent. That would be trivial
to add and then we could just have one plugin, one cache, shared
loop/maxchain counters, and one set of eval rules.
Currently we have an overlapping set of rules:
eval:short_url
eval:short_url_redir
eval:short_url_200
eval:short_url_404
eval:short_url_code
eval:short_url_chained
eval:short_url_maxchain
eval:short_url_loop
eval:short_url_tests <-- deprecated
eval:redir_url
eval:redir_url_valid <-- was redir_url_redir before I renamed it
eval:redir_url_404
eval:redir_url_code
eval:redir_url_chained
eval:redir_url_chained_domain
eval:redir_url_maxchain
eval:redir_url_loop
What are we trying to acheive?
I share your confusion, given the replicated code. I also can't see how
the logical overlap is conceived to work, since all shorteners are
redirectors but not all redirectors are shorteners. It seems to me that
we should only have one tool for turning HTTP(S) URLs in mail into their
ultimate target URLs and intermediates which may also need to be judged
by URIBLs and other URL-based rules. Just the existence of 16
mostly-redundant(?) evals hints at all the edge cases we want to handle
correctly.
It looks like Giovanni is the person who can answer all of this.
--
Bill Cole
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