Spy on Redirects and Don’t Get Rickrolled

Posted on January 3rd, 2008 in Cloaking

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For those who don’t know about the art of Rickrolling, it’s one of the most hilarious internet passtimes of the decade.  The idea is to plant a link on a website, forum, blog comment, whatever that people will want to click out of curiosity, but when they click it, they will be redirected to a video of Rick Astley’s music video of “Never Gonna Give You Up.”  If you’re a reader of Wickedfire Forums, then you’ve likely become quite accustomed to being Rick Rolled on a daily basis.   If there’s one thing Nickycakes loves, it’s new and creative ways to annoy the hell out of people.  It has become such a phenomenon that an entire website and forum have been started dedicated to discussing different methods of Rick Rolling people.

While most can agree that RickRolling others can be fun, being rickrolled yourself is never fun.  So what can you do to prevent it?  That’s what a good friend of Nickycakes was thinking when he made Link Nark.   Enter any url in Link Nark and it will tell you where you will end up if it redirects you somewhere.

Ok, that’s cute, you can prevent getting rickrolled, but that may lose it’s novelty pretty quickly, and most people would rather just click it and spend the 30 seconds closing the window rather than copying and pasting the url to another site to check it.  Link Nark has another use, however, that isn’t mentioned on the site.

Ever want to find out where a cloaked link goes?  Want to figure out what affiliate network someone is running that dating campaign with?  You can enter any link you know is being redirected and it will tell you not only where it redirects to, but all the redirects that happened in between (if any).  Works great =)

Anyway, like mentioned earlier, the dude who created the site is a friend, so hit him up with a digg if you use it.