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## Multiple URL shorteners in a web-based challenge

In challenges which require fetching data from the Internet, URL shorteners can be problematic. This is because:

- shorteners made after the challenge was posted are like features that were added after the challenge was posted and there's no easy way to find when a URL was created

- they outsource the "actual" URL which is a violation of the outsourcing loophole

- noncanonical URLs are somewhat boring and using them is a tedious way to save bytes

I propose that each web-based challenge would have a single ["canonical"](http://tiny.cc/robots) URL to be used in each answer, such that the actual challenge doesn't depend on its length.