Monthly Archives: August 2007

Pastebin fights the spam!

A few people have emailed me recently disappointed by the level of spam postings on pastebin.com. I’ve never really understood why spammers bother, but as they are bothering in increasing numbers it was time to take some action.

Last night I built in some spam filtering which has caught hundreds of posts since going live. I also added a “report spam” link which has flagged over 500 posts in past 20 hours. By iteratively tweaking the spam filter to identify the legimately flagged posts, I’ve been able to quickly delete a lot of older spam posts.

Hopefully this will make pastebin look like a well tended garden rather than a run-down wasteland! Comments welcome…