Pastebin.com

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.^[3]

Pastebin

Type of site	Web application
Created by	Paul Dixon
URL	pastebin.com
IPv6 support	Yes
Registration	Optional (required for creating private pastes.)
Users	17 million (2019)[1]
Launched	September 3, 2002; 22 years ago (2002-09-03)[2]
Current status	Active
Written in	PHP

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.^[3]

• In July 2012, the owners of Pastebin.com tweeted that they had surpassed the 20 million active pastes mark.^[4]

• On June 9, 2015, they announced they had reached 65 million active pastes.^[5] They also mentioned that around 75% of pastes are either unlisted or private.^[6]

• In December 2015, Pastebin.com reached 95 million active pastes, and more than 2 million members.^[7]

During the 2014 Venezuelan protests, Pastebin.com was blocked by the country's government as one of the sites used by activists sharing information pertaining to the protests.^[8]

In April 2020, Pastebin.com removed their built-in search feature and restricted their web scraping API, including for paid lifetime subscribers of Pastebin Pro. As an additional spam prevention measure, pastes from users not logged in are hidden from the list of recent pastes, visible in the site's side bar.^[9]

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.^[10][11]

On October 14, 2020, the terms of service were updated and the mention that contributions were CC BY-SA was removed.^[12]

Pastebin.com is a popular source of .onion links that lead to the dark web.^[13]

See also

• Snippet (programming)

References

1. "What is Pastebin and Why Do Hackers Love It?". www.echosec.net. Echosec Systems. Archived from the original on March 4, 2021. Retrieved February 15, 2021.
2. "PasteBin.com WHOIS, DNS, & Domain Info - DomainTools". WHOIS. Archived from the original on November 13, 2020. Retrieved December 3, 2016.
3. "Pastebin.com Surpasses 10 Million "Active" Pastes". TechCrunch.com. October 26, 2011. Archived from the original on October 27, 2011. Retrieved October 27, 2011.
4. Pastebin [@pastebin] (July 4, 2012). "Time for cake!!! Pastebin.com now hosts more than 20 million active pastes! Stats -> pastebin.com/stats" (Tweet) – via Twitter.
5. "Pastebin on Facebook: "Pastebin reached another big milestone yesterday..."". Facebook. Archived from the original on August 30, 2023. Retrieved December 3, 2016.
6. Pastebin [@pastebin] (June 25, 2015). "Fun fact, over 75% of all pastes created on Pastebin these days are unlisted or private" (Tweet) – via Twitter.
7. Biggs, John (December 16, 2015). "Pastebin, The Text Sharing Website, Updates With An Emphasis On Code". Archived from the original on September 23, 2020. Retrieved September 7, 2017.
8. "Internet a crucial Venezuela battleground". Jamaica Observer. Kingston, Jamaica. Associated Press. February 23, 2014. Archived from the original on November 13, 2020. Retrieved August 20, 2014.
9. "Pastebin Made It Harder To Scrape Its Site And Researchers Are Pissed Off". www.vice.com. April 16, 2020. Archived from the original on February 27, 2021. Retrieved September 30, 2020.
10. September 2020, Anthony Spadafora 28 (September 28, 2020). "Pastebin may have just doomed us all". TechRadar. Archived from the original on September 29, 2020. Retrieved September 30, 2020.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
11. online, heise. "Pastebin.com: Zwei neue Features könnten Malware-Machern in die Hände spielen". Security (in German). Archived from the original on September 30, 2020. Retrieved September 30, 2020.
12. "Pastebin.com Terms of Service UPDATED". Archived from the original on October 14, 2020.
13. Koebler, Jason (February 23, 2015). "The Closest Thing to a Map of the Dark Net: Pastebin". Motherboard. Archived from the original on November 8, 2020. Retrieved July 14, 2015.

External links

• Official website
• Original source code