Revised and expanded at 12:50 ET, with comment from Political Media president Larry Ward.

The Republican party took down its innovative link-shortening tool Tuesday for several hours after pranksters had a field day using the tool to associate the GOP with bondage sites.

As part of its new media strategy, the Republican party launched a new site called GOP.am on Monday. It's a URL shortener designed to make it easy for conservative web surfers to exchange links to web pages.

Pranksters almost immediately began using the service to link to controversial or ironically intended websites, such as the official site of the American Communist Party, a bondage website and a webpage advertising a sex toy in the likeness of Barack Obama. GOP.am apparently started blocking such links at some point Tuesday morning, and the GOP.am homepage was taken offline.

The website is back online late Tuesday morning PST, and the company that designed the site in collaboration with the Republican National Committee plans to add an automatic filtering system to help with the high volume of what its president calls "pornographic, lewd" or "hateful" URLs being added to its service.

Possibly the first branded URL shortener, GOP.am was designed by the RNC's new media consultants, Political Media, to work somewhat like bit.ly, in that it shortens URLs so that they can be more easily exchanged through short messaging services like Twitter. Google launched its own URL shortener Monday afternoon, and Facebook now has one, too.

But unlike bit.ly, GOP.am includes a toolbar at the top of the screen that follows users as they click through to see whatever pages the links go to – particularly awkward when that website is the alt.com bondage site, and the technique is combined with a URL that adds animation of RNC chairman Michael Steele walking around on the lower right as if he's showing off the website. Users of the Balloon-Juice website entertained each other last night by exchanging scores of such links, which have since been blocked.

Political Media president Larry Ward told Wired.com that Political Media, which collaborated with the Republican National Committee on GOP.am, is filtering URLs posted the site on an hourly basis, using manual and eventually automated techniques.

"Our objective is to keep it clean," said Ward. "We're not going to remove someone who puts GOP.am on Barack Obama's page, we're not going to remove somebody who puts it on the communist page. The links that we're going to edit are the pornographic ones, the lewd ones – obviously those type of links or anything that is overtly … hateful, we're going to remove those."

He's not worried about the volume of prank URLs presenting a filtering problem because automating filtering, which could have been implemented before GOP.am launched but was not, will help its staff manually delete the links, and interest in pranking the system will die down.

"We're going to do a pretty good job at it," said Ward, who clarified that while the Republican party collaborated on the creation of GOP.am, the site is officially property of his Republican-affiliated new media consultancy, Political Media. "We're building a filtering system which should be in place shortly, and on top of that we're going to manually monitor and block the IP addresses that post that kind of stuff, and eventually, the novelty of it will wear off and we'll get less pranks, so to speak. But in the meantime we're just going to monitor it on an hour-by-hour basis and make sure that it's used for the purposes for which it was intended."

This updated screenshot depicts the GOP.am-linked version of this story.

The toolbar includes branding for the GOP, links for re-propagating the link on Twitter, Facebook and other sites, and a "donate to the GOP" button. Political Media, whose other clients include Republican candidates, think tanks and the House of Representatives Agriculture Committee's Republican minority, according to a Political Media spokesman, designed it with conservative users in mind.

Political Media's Ward told Wired.com he saw the pranks coming a mile away. "Believe me, we were well aware that this was going to happen," he said. "We've been on the internet doing business for every aspect of it since 1996. I was well aware exactly what was going to happen."

When the Republican party announced a plan in March to reinvent its online strategy, chairman Steele said, "Bottom line is if we haven't done it, let's do it. If we haven't thought of it, think of it. If it hasn't been tried, why not? If it's going to be 'outside the box' — then not only keep it outside the box, but take it to someplace the box hasn't even reached yet.'" The Republican plan (.pdf) was received with mockery from detractors and members of the Republican party alike, for its alleged vagueness and reliance on buzzwords.

A note on the front of GOP.am warns, "If you use it for spamming or illegal purposes, your GOP.am URL will be disabled." Although the pranksters' links qualify as neither illegal nor spam, GOP.am has removed many of them, which now lead to an error page. The site also says, "This service is provided without warranty of any kind," so GOP.am is free to block the links. Still, the prank-deletion process could prove time-consuming enough for the RNC to decide to remove the toolbar and animation of chairman Steele eventually. Now, the site's back up, and the toolbar and animation still appear.

Ward told us Political Media plans to keep both elements of the service in place. So for now, GOP.am-shortened links that are not blocked by the site's filters will still display GOP.am's toolbar.

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(Thanks, Pete Babb.)