Two short urls for the same long url

+1 makes sense to me. if different users wanted to create different custom aliases for the same url, fine, but it doesn't make sense for the same user to be able to create 2 aliases (1 random, 1 custom) for the same url!

First off, this is a feature request not a bug report. It works as designed.

Second, I disagree with your opinion of how this should work.

There are custom URLs and there are generated URLs. Custom URLs are entered by the user and will often have meaning. Generated URLs are, in essence, random and without meaning. In my opinion if you "ask" for a generated URL, you should not get a URL with meaning. You should get back a generated URL. It might be the same one you've generated previously - after all these URLs are not prescious, but it should be essentially meaningless.

Let's say I create a custom URL such as http://lb.cm/i-hate-this-site. That very much has meaning. If at a later date my opinion of the linked site changes and I want to quickly create a new link, I shouldn't get back a meaning-based URL.

Additionally, this proposed feature request would essentially disallow me from ever creating a meaningless, generated short URL for a long URL once I've created a custom short URL for it. I would always get back http://lb.cm/i-hate-this-site. In my opinion that's not how it should work.

All that being said, I do agree that it would be convenient for ShURLy to return the custom URL you've created if you enter the same long URL again. You've put in some work crafting that URL and it's frustrating to have it kind of throw away your work. It's almost treating generated URLs as more important than custom URLs. I'm just not sure that this is the best way to implement a solution to that problem.

So... How would I solve this problem? Maybe it should return ALL of the short URLs you've created for a given long URL.

So if you enter a long URL that has existing generated and custom short URLs, and you do not enter any custom URL text into the form, the results might look like:

Long URL:
  http://www.example.com/my_long_URL

Your short URL:
  http://lb.cm/CjV  [copy]
  Create a Twitter message with this URL

Your additional short URLs:
  http://lb.cm/custom-url-3 [copy]
  http://lb.cm/custom-url-2 [copy]
  http://lb.cm/custom-url-1 [copy]

Would that solve this problem?

However, I should note: this starts to get hairy if you allow anonymous users to create custom URLs because we probably don't want every user who enters a long URL to get a history of every custom entry for it. But perhaps it could be tied to the "View own URL stats" permission.

Old issue. Closing.