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
Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...
that they had already 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.
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 were used by activists sharing information pertaining to the protests.
In 2015, Pastebin.com reached 95 million active pastes, and more than 2 million members.
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 extracting data from websites. Web scraping software may directly access the World Wide Web using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol or a web browser. While web scraping ...
API
An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how ...
, including for paid lifetime subscribers of ''Pastebin Pro''. As an additional
spam
Spam may refer to:
* Spam (food), a canned pork meat product
* Spamming, unsolicited or undesired electronic messages
** Email spam, unsolicited, undesired, or illegal email messages
** Messaging spam, spam targeting users of instant messaging ( ...
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
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 communi ...
.onion
.onion is a special-use top level domain name designating an anonymous onion service, which was formerly known as a "hidden service", reachable via the Tor network. Such addresses are not actual DNS names, and the .onion TLD is not in the I ...
links.
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 Module (programming), programming modules. Snippet management is a ...
References
External links
*
Original source code
Internet properties established in 2002
File sharing services
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