Troubleshooting

Five problems, in the order they come up. Each one says how to tell it apart from the others, which matters more here than usual: three of them look like "the link is dead".

Five problems · the reveal page distinguishes most of them

A link stopped working

Check the reveal page first. It distinguishes the three cases that look identical from the outside: never existed, expired, and currently live.

Never existed — the slug was never issued. Nothing to recover.
Expired — it existed and its seven days are up. Also nothing to recover; create the link again.
Live — then the problem is somewhere else, most often a typo in the slug.

If reveal says the link is live and following it still fails, the destination itself is the problem, and shortn cannot see that.

My custom slug was rejected

Three separate reasons produce three different messages, and they need different responses.

slug must be 3-32 chars

The shape was wrong. Fix the slug. The rules.

slug reserved

The site needs it for itself. Pick another; there is nothing to wait for.

slug taken

Someone has it, right now. Pick another, or use the remove endpoint if it is yours and you know that.

The slug checker answers the same question without creating anything, which is the cheaper way to find out.

Reading a QR code does nothing

Decoding uses the browser's BarcodeDetector, which is Chrome and Edge only. Nothing is wrong with your image and nothing is wrong with the page.

There is no bundled decoder behind that half of the page, deliberately: one running on a server would mean uploading your photo, and this site will not do that. On Firefox and Safari, use your phone's camera instead, which has its own decoder.

I keep hitting 429

You are over the per-minute limit for one endpoint. Wait for the value in the retry-after header and try again.

There is no way to raise a limit and no queue to wait in — requests over the limit are refused, not held. If you are building something that needs more, batch with bulk or poll the unlimited endpoints instead of the listing ones. The full table is on the limits page.

A page 404s that you expect to exist

Every static route is listed in sitemap.xml, which is generated from the same table that produces the navigation. If a route is not in the sitemap, it does not exist.

One exception worth knowing: Cloudflare serves the 404 page at both /404.html and /404, and /404.html redirects to /404. If you were linking to the former, use the latter.