Re: ftwca paste.debian.net
Alexander Wirt dijo [Tue, Jan 13, 2026 at 08:41:23AM +0100]:
I certainly was using paste.debian.net to distribute some text files "forever".
This will break various links in old mails I've sent, in forum posts or other
places where I wanted to link to snippets which I intended to be distributed
for a longer time.
paste.d.n is a pastebin and not a file distribution service. I never made any
promises about availability of the files. I agree that such a service is needed
and I wanted to keep them all. However, during the review, I looked into the
depths of the human soul and found things there that were almost impossible to
surpass in terms of repugnance. For this reason, the service is now severely
limited and monitored.
Is there a problem with disk space? It would be a bit sad if all these old
links would be broken and the content behind them lost forever.
They will not come back. We are talking about several thousand entries where malware and other
illegal content is included. I dumped them all.
Thank you very much, Alexander. I am sorry you had to go through all that
harmful content (and trust you gave up on it before too long).
Of course, I sympathize with Johaness, but I am aware of the problematic
paste.d.n posed; I had thought about the issue of most content appearing to
be spam, but never took action to write about it — and apologize for just
pushing the thought aside.
Anyway, on to my point: The paste.d.n as it worked for several years didn't
set the right expectations. I agree with Alexander, I never expected
paste.d.n to be there “forever”, specially given the open way in which it
operated.
Now, given the resource is controlled and we should not expect a large
amount of spam / malware... Alexander, I understand you not wanting to
commit to a “forever” storage, but I would also appreciate if you added a
way to add different expiry periods (including a reasonably-long-length),
or a way to manage your old postings to “refresh” them.
Thanks for providing and maintaining this great service!
– Gunnar.
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