Why is Twitter shortening example.com hostnames?

mkrenz · 2012-09-25T14:09:55.000Z

I recently tried to post a message that was exactly 140 characters with host.example.com in it and the message was rejected as being too long because Twitter is trying to shorten the URL. However, according to the longstanding RFC 2606, example.com isn’t an active domain on the Internet and thus Twitter shouldn’t be trying to shorten it. Its meant for documentation and example purposes, so there is no need to send such hostnames through Twitter’s malware protection, since such a hostname wouldn’t work anyways. Can this be changed?

mkrenz · 2012-09-25T19:54:57.000Z

Just so its clear, I’m asking if Twitter can change its URL processor so that it ignores any use of example.com and the other RFC 2606 domains and treats it like normal text.

cjmcguinness · 2012-09-25T23:15:09.000Z

This doesn’t address your main question (which you’ll need to get answered by Twitter), but I’ll point out a cheesy workaround: the unicode character “one dot leader” ․ (U+2024) does not trigger the URL wrapping and does not turn into a hyperlink when the tweet is viewed by others. It looks close enough: example․com (assuming this discussion board doesn’t eat strange unicode characters).