URL Cleaner Bot

URL Cleaner Bot has no menus, no settings and no second feature. You send it a link, it answers with the link cleaned of tracking data. Add it to a group and it does the same for links other members post there, which is the more useful half: in a busy chat nobody bothers to trim links by hand.

Under the hood it relies on Unalix, an open library that applies the ClearURLs rule set, the same catalogue of tracking parameters that the ClearURLs browser extension uses. That matters because the rules know which parts of a query are tracking and which are needed for the page to open, so the link keeps working after cleaning.

The bot is a personal instance run by a developer who goes by agneev; the Telegram profile names him and links the source code on GitHub, and the repository in turn links back to @clean_urls_bot. The bio also says the bot keeps no logs. That is a statement rather than an audit, but the code is public and can be run on your own server if you prefer.

The honest weak point is age. The code was last changed in November 2022, so fixes to the underlying rules depend on the library rather than on the bot itself, and a one-person hosting setup can go quiet without warning. As a light, no-frills tool for tidying links in a group, it still does its job.