this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2025
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I'm not clicking on a link that looks like someone typed it in by putting their head on the keyboard
Welcome to today’s 10,000. Today’s episode is about Punycode. It’s basically a standardized way of putting unusual characters in a domain name.
The way the link is shown in your interface/client, it’s giving you the encoded version that looks nonsensical. But if you click on it, the link in your browser’s address bar will more likely render properly.
I’ve seen this done with URLs that contain emojis, this one contains katakana (?) characters.
@ggtdbz @Hello_there The author actually has a post on this, too: https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/never-click-on-a-link-that-looks-like-that/
(I'm guessing you deliberately avoided it since the person you're responding to would also refuse to click that but I think it's an interesting read for anyone who hasn't seen it)