FAQ [Frequently Asked Questions]
This is our help page, below you can find a list of the most frequently asked questions:
1. What is Pastebin.com all about?
2. What is your Acceptable Use Policy?
3. How can I contact Pastebin?
4. What is MY PASTEBIN?
5. How do folders work?
6. How many pastes can I create?
7. How does your Spam Filter work?
8. Is there an API?
9. Who can see my pastes?
10. How does your hits counter work?
11. How can I get content removed?
12. What is the maximum paste size?
13. For which languages do you offer syntax highlighting?
14. Can I advertise my product/brand on Pastebin?
15. Can I change my username?
16. How do I downgrade my PRO account?
17. I got blocked! Can I scrape your website?
18. Do my pastes stay online forever?
19.
20. How do I delete my account?
What is Pastebin.com all about?
Pastebin is a website where you can store any text online for easy sharing. The website is mainly used by programmers to store pieces of sources code or configuration information, but anyone is more than welcome to paste any type of text. The idea behind the site is to make it more convenient for people to share large amounts of text online.
What is your Acceptable Use Policy?
Broadly speaking, the site was created to help programmers. You are however welcome to post any type of text to Pastebin. Please do not post email lists, password lists or personal information. The "report abuse" feature can be used to flag such pastes and they will be deleted. Do not aggressively spider the site. If you do want to scrape our website, use our scraping API.
Do NOT post:
- email lists
- login details
- stolen source code
- hacked data
- copyrighted information / data
- password lists
- banking / creditcard / financial information / data
- personal information / data
- pornographic information / data
- spam links (this includes promoting your own site)
If you do not comply with our Acceptable Use Policy we might ban your account and/or IP address from the website. More information can be found in our Terms of Service.
How can I contact Pastebin?
Check out our contact page.
What is MY PASTEBIN?
When you create an account you get your own Pastebin. This means you can now store pastes and have full control over them at any point in the future. Having your own Pastebin is also great for sharing your pastes with others. Your Pastebin is both public and private at the same time. Your public pastes are visible to everybody while the private ones are only visible to you.
How do folders work?
When you create a new paste, simply select the folder where you want the past to be posted in. If you click the + symbol, you can also create a new folder, and the paste will then be placed into that folder. When editing a paste you can move/remove a paste from a folder.
Who can see my folders?
If a user creates a folder, and puts 'public' pastes in that folder, to others, those pastes will show up in the root folder of that Pastebin account. However, for the logged in user who created the folder, those pastes will show in the folder they were put in.
Note: Folders are meant to organize your own private Pastebin better and are only visible to the logged in user who created them.
How many pastes can I create?
The short answer is: as many as you like.
There are however some limitations to fight off spammers.
Guests can create up to 10 new pastes per 24 hours.
Free members can create up to 20 new pastes per 24 hours.
PRO members can create up to 250 new pastes per 24 hours.
Further limits are:
Guest can create unlimited 'public' pastes, unlimited 'unlisted' pastes, but can't create 'private' pastes.
Free members can create unlimited 'public' pastes, 10 'unlisted' pastes, 10 'private' pastes.
PRO members can create unlimited 'public' pastes, unlimited 'unlisted' pastes, unlimited 'private' pastes.
But I see some people post way more than those limits, how is that possible?
Some users have special permissions to their accounts. If you want to post more than 250 pastes per day, please contact us.
How does your Spam Filter work?
Pastebin uses an automated spam protection system that will sometimes display a captcha request after you have tried to create a new paste. When you get a captcha request, you have 10 minutes to enter a valid response. If you don't validate your paste within 10 minutes, we will automatically remove it.
Various things can trigger this captcha spam protection.
A few examples are:
- trying to create a certain amount of new pastes in a short period of time. (flooding)
- trying to create pastes with links in it.
- trying to create duplicate pastes.
- trying to create pastes with 'suspicious' keywords in it.
There are various levels of spam protection. Anonymous guests, free members and PRO members all have different spam detection levels. Being a PRO member will allow you to post "almost" anything without the automatic spam protection being activated.
Is there an API?
Yes, we have got an API available.
Who can see my pastes?
If you create a public paste (public by default), your paste will show up for everybody in the menu on the right and on the archive pages. You can also create unlisted pastes, these items will be invisible for others unless you share your paste link. If you are a member of Pastebin you can also create private pastes. These items can only be viewed by you when you are logged in and are therefore password protected. Search engines will only index public pastes.
How can I get content removed?
You are only able to remove items that you created while you were logged in. If you pasted something as a guest, there is no quick delete option. You can however use the 'REPORT ABUSE' button above each paste, and explain why the item has to be removed. We try to handle all removal requests within 24 hours. You can also email us.
For DMCA removal requests please click here.
How does your hits counter work?
The hits shown above each paste displays the number of unique visitors. We only count a visitor once per certain amount of time, and we try to filter out bot & scraper traffic from the hits counter. We also do not include hits which came from the RAW version of pastes, so only the hits that happened on our actual website.
What is the maximum paste size?
The maximum size a paste can be is 512 kilobytes (0.5 megabytes). This is should be enough for almost any script, and it prevents people from jamming our servers. PRO members are allowed to create pastes up to 10 megabytes.
For which languages do you offer syntax highlighting?
ABAP / ActionScript / ActionScript 3 / Ada / Apache Log / AppleScript / APT Sources / ASM (NASM) / ASP / AutoIt / Avisynth / Bash / Basic4GL / Batch / BibTeX / Blitz Basic / BNF / BOO / BrainFuck / C / C for Macs / C Intermediate Language / C# / C++ / CAD DCL / CAD Lisp / CFDG / Clone C / Clone C++ / CMake / COBOL / ColdFusion / CSS / D / DCS / Delphi / Diff / DIV / DOT / Eiffel / Email / Erlang / FO Language / Fortran / FreeBasic / Game Maker / Genero / GetText / Groovy / Haskell / HQ9 Plus / HTML / IDL / INI file / Inno Script / INTERCAL / IO / Java / Java 5 / JavaScript / KiXtart / Latex / Linden Scripting / Lisp / Loco Basic / LOL Code / Lotus Formulas / Lua / M68000 Assembler / MatLab / mIRC / MPASM / MySQL / NullSoft Installer / Objective C / OCaml / OpenGL Shading / Openoffice BASIC / Oracle 8 / Pascal / Perl / PHP / PL/SQL / Python / QBasic / Rails / Robots / Ruby / Ruby Gnuplot / Scheme / Smalltalk / Smarty / SQL / TCL / VB.NET / VisualBasic / VisualFoxPro / XML / Z80 Assembler /
All archives are listed here. We use the Geshi software for our highlighting. Please contact us if you want to suggest a new language.
Can I advertise my product/brand on Pastebin?
Absolutely! Contact us directly.
Can I change my username?
Absolutely! But this is only available for PRO users. What about getting a username that is already taken? This is also possible, but only if the user in question has become inactive. This means, if a user has no pastes in his-her account, and hasn't logged in for over 6 months. On the username changer page you can check username availability.
How do I downgrade my PRO account?
Simply go to the billing page in your profile.
I got blocked! Can I scrape your website?
Yes, but we do limit the amount of requests that people can make, so it is very possible that you get blocked from time to time. If you want to scrape our platform more intensely, we have a custom scraper API available where we can whitelist your IP, so you don't get blocked anymore. This feature is only available for PRO users. To learn more, visit our scraping page.
Do my pastes stay online forever?
That depends on you. You decide if you want your pastes to "expire". Setting an expiration date will automatically remove the paste after a certain amount of time. Also, as a member you can always delete your pastes whenever you like.
At this moment in time we do not delete pastes that do not have an expiration date. But in the future we might automatically delete pastes that have not been viewed by anyone in more than 6 months. Again, this is not something we are doing at this moment. But we might start doing it in the future. PRO users will never have their posts automatically removed due to inactivity.
Can I post links & images?
We allow clickable links & images to be posted, but only by our PRO users. Reason is, to prevent abuse of this functionality. Via the Markdown language you can post images, links, make text big/small, include tables and much much more.
How do I delete my account?
You can delete your Pastebin account at any time. Simply go to this page. You will be asked to log into your account (if you aren't already logged in).