The latest edition of wikizine said:
[No Tinyurl] On Meta there is a global
blacklist of domains. Url's of domains listed
there can not be posted on any Wikimedia wiki.
This is an anti-spam function of Wikimedia.
The widely used domain "tinyurl.com" is now
added to the blacklist.
Tinyurl.com is a free
redirect service to make a very long url very
short. This service has been abused by
spammers to link sites already on the blacklist.
Is there any evidence that this service has been abused by spammers?
Since tinyurl links wouldn't increase the page rank of a spammer's
site, I don't see why they'd bother using it, especially since most
wiki spam is now hidden from humans in invisible div tags, meaning the
only aim can be to influence search results.
The Spam Blacklist is shared by a lot of non-Wikimedia sites, so we
need to be sure the URLs listed there are really spam, and not
something which is going to cause problems for valid links on other
wikis.
Angela.