Making ugly URLs decent

DecentURL was a URL “decent-ification” service inspired by a reddit comment. It turned unreadable URLs like youtube.com/watch?v=pQHX-SjgQvQ into nice ones like youtube.decenturl.com/medieval-help-desk . I ran it from 2007 till 2020:

Oct 2007: launched. See the original blog post.

Jan 2010: started requiring accounts due to abuse.

Jun 2016: turned off the ability to add new URLs, but continued redirecting old ones.

Jan 2020: disabled the redirection service entirely.

Oct 2020: let the DecentURL.com domain name expire.

Sorry! But the URLs weren’t being hit much anymore, and the ones that were were mostly 404’s anyway. I figure 12+ years was a good run.

Contact me (Ben Hoyt).