Here’s the latest episode in the ongoing trainwreck known as the GOP website. Would somebody please sit the GOP’s web designers down and give them a good lesson on how these Intraweb thingies actually work?

Pranksters Make Short Work of GOP’s URL Shortener for Conservatives.

The Republican party took down its innovative link-shortening tool Tuesday for several hours after pranksters had a field day using the tool to associate the GOP with bondage sites.

As part of its new media strategy, the Republican party launched a new site called gop.am on Monday. It’s a URL shortener designed to make it easy for conservative web surfers to exchange links to web pages.

Pranksters almost immediately began using the service to link to controversial or ironically intended websites, such as the official site of the American Communist Party, a bondage website and a webpage advertising a sex toy in the likeness of Barack Obama. gop.am apparently started blocking such links at some point Tuesday morning, and the gop.am homepage was taken offline.

The website is back online late Tuesday morning PST, and the company that designed the site in collaboration with the Republican National Committee plans to add an automatic filtering system to help with the high volume of what its president calls “pornographic, lewd” or “hateful” URLs being added to its service.

Failing to foresee this kind of thing is so incredibly amateurish, it boggles the mind.

GOP Spent More Than a Million Dollars to Launch a Disastrous Website
Is Anyone Minding the Store at the GOP’s Brand New Website?
GOP.com: Web-Savvy Students Not a Must
GOP Posts Gmail Password/Login on New Site
New GOP Site: NSFW

UPDATE at 12/15/09 12:18:29 pm:

Screenshots from the latest trainwreck. (Hat tip: recusancy.)