A pastebin is a type of web application where anyone can store text for a certain period of time. This type of website is mainly used by programmers to store pieces of source code or configuration information, but anyone can basically share any type of text. The idea behind pastebins is to make it more convenient for people to share large amounts of text online. A vast number of pastebin related websites exist on the Internet, suiting a number of different needs and providing features tailored towards the crowd they focus on most.
History
Pastebin-related websites have been around since at least 2002.[citation needed] Pastebin.com is the most popular one and also one of the earliest. Over time, many of the public pastebins have become specialized and targeted at a single group of users. In many cases, pastes made to pastebins are kept only for a certain period of time. Some, however, allow for varying lengths of time anywhere from one minute to an infinite amount of time.
Pastebin.com
To this day, Pastebin.com[1] is the most popular[citation needed] text sharing service on the internet. It took 8 years for Pastebin.com to surpass 10 million "Active" pastes (not spam or expired pastes).[2] Less than a year later the owners of Pastebin.com tweeted that they had already surpased the 20 million active pastes mark.[3] This shows massive growth, and that more and more people use a Pastebin type of service to share large amounts of text online.[4]
In February 2010, Pastebin.com was sold by the original owner Mr. Dixon to a new owner called Mr. Vader.[citation needed] Only a few weeks after the transfer, Mr. Vader had launched a whole new version of the website which he branded V2.0. Since that point the site really started to gain popularity. In early 2011 V3.0 launched, which is the version of the website that is still online today. In May and June 2011, Pastebin.com received what has been called "its biggest traffic in it's nine year history" when it was used by hacker group LulzSec to post information connected to several of its attacks.[citation needed]
The term "Pastebin" has even earned a spot in the UrbanDictionary.[5] Two good examples are: 1. Hey Mike, can you "pastebin" that document please? 2. John can I send you this text file? Sure, please just "pastebin it".
Common features
Although there are literally hundreds of pastebins available, most have a common set of features. They may appear different or target a different user base, but at the core, they take an upload or text paste and provide a sharable HTTP URL that contains the body of text. A pastebin often has the capability to apply formatting and syntax highlighting to the text for easier viewing. Throughout the years, the number of languages and formatting styles has grown quickly as the Pastebin user base has grown and their needs have fanned out. A well-known highlighting software package called GeSHi supports the most common pastebins. Some of the newer pastebins provide features for comparing two or more pastes, synchronous notifications through IRC or XMPP, paste histories, encryption, password protection, and virtual subdomains. Nowadays, created pastebins allows pasted codes to be executed at server side.
Abuse and spam
In some cases, pastebin sites have been abused as a venue in which to post personal information, such as passwords or identifiers. In one such incident, media coverage of abusive postings of approximately 20,000 Hotmail passwords as part of a phishing scheme led Paul Dixon, the operator of the original pastebin.com to temporarily close the site with the following message: "Pastebin.com was intended as a tool to aid software developers, not for distributing this sort of material. Filters have been put in place to prevent reoccurrence, but the current traffic level is unsustainable. Pastebin.com is just a fun side project for me, and today it's not fun. It will remain offline all day while I make some further modifications."
For Pastebin websites, spam is a large problem. The spambots or spammers involved in this sort of activity may not realize that most pastebins do not allow search engines to index their pages or even follow the links. This causes an extra burden on the services to provide filtering of pastes which would not accomplish the intended goal. To protect against spam, some pastebins have implemented CAPTCHAs.
Applications in microblogging
There are some pastebins that exist specifically to surpass character limitations of microblogging services like Twitter. The idea is to save a large piece of text in a pastebin and post the URL and text excerpt to microblogging services that have character limitations.
Programming assistance features
There are specialized pastebins to assist programmers with debugging, testing, and simulation. Using these systems, a user is able to paste a program component to the website, which will then compile or execute the software. The results of execution or compilation, such as errors, are then stored and provided to the user.
References
