I run pastebin.com, and maintain it daily. I check for abuses of the service, block IP addresses of serial offenders and try to ensure it provides a speedy and useful service.

I make the software available for others to use and improve upon too.

pastebin.org is one such site, but I’m starting to get emails from people who’ve used that site and are now infected with the Win32/Alureo trojan virus. In addition, the site seems to have been compromised in other ways, with extra advertising banners and popups.

I’m not responsible for that site. I’ve tried to make contact with the registrant listed in whois records, but not had a response.

The moral of the story: if you want to stay safe, stick with pastebin.com!

As there’s been some cases of cracked email address lists being posted on pastebin recently, this week I tweaked the spam filtering to block such posts. A few legitimate posts got caught in the crossfire, causing a few more tweaks to the rules.

If you’re having trouble posting something because pastebin says it looks like spam, post a sample in a comment below and I’ll see what I can do to improve it!

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…