Comment by M4v3R
5 days ago
You might be onto something, I noticed that all the banned links were in the format:
https://signal.me/#eu/fdy5h1miMifXa...
The URL hash (the part after #) is often not considered by automated systems to be a part of URL that's meaningful, because hash is normally only used for addressing parts of the website that was loaded based on the previous part of the URL. If a particular Signal.me link was flagged for whatever legitimate reason (contained malware or illegal content) it's entirely reasonable that an automated system would strip the hash and block the whole domain (because the path part in this URL is just "/" and nothing else).
It'll be interesting to see whether they address and reverse it. If not, then we can be fairly sure this was intentional.
You can actually post links of the form https://signal.me/asdf. But https://signal.me/#asdf is blocked. That supports you point of view, I guess?
If you can post links in the form of signal.me/asdf then yes, this reinforces my point that they've probably automatically flagged the top-level domain because of how these /#me links are constructed by Signal.
Or they just did a poor job of implementing the block on signal links