A pastebin or text storage site[1][2][3] is a type of online content hosting

service where users can store plain text, e.g. to source code snippets for code
review via Internet Relay Chat (IRC). The first pastebin was the eponymous
pastebin.com. Other sites with the same functionality have appeared, and several
open source pastebin scripts are available. Pastebins may allow commenting where
readers can post feedback directly on the page. GitHub Gists are a type of pastebin
with version control.

History
Pastebins developed in the late 1990s to facilitate IRC chatrooms devoted to
computing,[citation needed] where users naturally needed to share large blocks of
computer input or output in a line-oriented medium. On such IRC channels, where the
formatting clues are subtle and several conversations can be closely interleaved,
blocks of computer data flood the queue, disrupting the intricate flow. A reference
to a pastebin entry, however, is a one-line hyperlink. Users are often warned to
instead use pastebins, or risk being banned from the service in the event of
disruption.

A new class of IRC bot has evolved. In a chatroom that is largely oriented around a
few pastebins, nothing more needs to be done after a pos