Pastebin.com is a
text storage site. It was created on September 3, 2002 by Paul Dixon, and reached 1 million active pastes (excluding spam and expired pastes) eight years later, in 2010.
It features syntax highlighting for a variety of programming and markup languages, as well as view counters for pastes and user profiles. Users can submit pastes as guests without registration, but an account allows managing pastes.
History
By October 2011, the site's active pastes numbers exceeded 10 million.
* In July 2012, the owners of Pastebin.com
tweeted
A tweet (officially known as a post since 2023) is a short status update on the social networking site Twitter (officially known as X since 2023) which can include images, videos, GIFs, straw polls, hashtags, mentions, and hyperlinks. Around ...
that they had surpassed the 20 million active pastes mark.
* On June 9, 2015, they announced they had reached 65 million active pastes. They also mentioned that around 75% of pastes are either unlisted or private.
* In December 2015, Pastebin.com reached 95 million active pastes, and more than 2 million members.
During the
2014 Venezuelan protests
In 2014, a series of protests, political demonstrations, and civil insurrection began in Venezuela due to the country's high levels of urban violence, inflation, and chronic shortages of basic goods attributed to economic policies such as strict ...
, Pastebin.com was
blocked by the country's government as one of the sites used by activists sharing information pertaining to the protests.
In April 2020, Pastebin.com removed their built-in search feature and restricted their
web scraping
Web scraping, web harvesting, or web data extraction is data scraping used for data extraction, extracting data from websites. Web scraping software may directly access the World Wide Web using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol or a web browser. W ...
API
An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how to build ...
, including for paid lifetime subscribers of ''Pastebin Pro''. As an additional
spam
Spam most often refers to:
* Spam (food), a consumer brand product of canned processed pork of the Hormel Foods Corporation
* Spamming, unsolicited or undesired electronic messages
** Email spam, unsolicited, undesired, or illegal email messages
...
prevention measure, pastes from users not logged in are hidden from the list of recent pastes, visible in the site's side bar.
In September 2020, two new features were added to the site. Users became able to password-protect pastes from viewing and request the paste be deleted immediately once viewed.
On October 14, 2020, the terms of service were updated and the mention that contributions were CC BY-SA was removed.
Pastebin.com is a popular source of
.onion links that lead to the
dark web
The dark web is the World Wide Web content that exists on darknets ( overlay networks) that use the Internet but require specific software, configurations, or authorization to access. Through the dark web, private computer networks can communica ...
.
Since 2014, a majority of the pastes on Pastebin.com are hacked accounts or leaked gift cards.
See also
*
Snippet (programming)
Snippet is a programming term for a small region of re-usable source code, machine code, or text. Ordinarily, these are formally defined operative units to incorporate into larger programming modules. Snippet management is a feature of some tex ...
References
External links
*
Original source code
Internet properties established in 2002
File sharing services
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