Long ago, I learnt about URL compressions, like tiny.cc, tinyURL.com and I have seen bit.ly and even j.mp. All of these came about because of the emergin 140/255 character technologies that mean you cannot have long URLs chewing up the amount of characters you can post in places like IRC, Twitter and in forums signatures.
Because of the way bbcode works, it works on the chars typed into the box of your signature, even though the viewers never see that.
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[url=http://www.google.com]Google![/url]
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[url=http://tiny.cc/XxXxX]Here![/url]
I went to Xelerus and performed a search to display all of my (ThePrivateer) mods, and list them by name, not category. The resulting url looked like this:
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http://xelerus.de/index.php?s=mod_search&c=&mname=&aname=ThePrivateer&sorta=2&sortb=1
http://tiny.cc/theprivateermods
Brilliant! Now with one link and a compartively tiny amount of characters, I can take people directly to my own page of Xelerus listings and am now freed up to have more text and more URls in my signature.
I just wanted to share with you my new trick! Some of you may know this, and some may just be learning. I suggest that large modders do the same, so you can link people to all you mods and watch your download counter go up!
PS. IMO, compression links are a bit of a worry. For one thing, they are 'blind' - clicking on a tiny url means you have no idea where you are being taken, so please provide as much information before posting the link so people know where they are being directed. In this age of potential internet threats, these blind links could cause trouble and I often am worried about using them, so that's why I have (in my signature), told users that the link is "for Xelerus".