Anyone who frequents programming-related IRC channels will already have an appreciation for online pastebins, originally termed nopastes. For those who might be unfamiliar the basic idea is that pastebins provide a quick and convenient way to display text on the web and share it with others. The canonical usage of a pastebin is a situation where an individual must share a snippet of source code with other programmers to illustrate a concept or seek advice. The most famous of pastebins:
- The original pastebin.com
- General pastebin, pastebin.ca
- paste.lisp.org primarily for pasting Lisp and Scheme code but capable of highlighting the syntax of a few other languages
- RAFB nopaste, rafb.net/paste
- gnopaste over at nopaste.info
Most interesting is the recent increase in pastebin spam. The open nature of pastebins make them ripe for abuse by spammers and that has led to numerous discussions of the problem and use of CAPTCHAs to try and combat the issue. I had no idea this was even an issue though it makes a lot of sense now that I think about it…
