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When I click on the Download as text link on the Ubuntu Pastebin it requires me to login to Ubuntu One. Why? I would like to grab the text with curl.

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1 Answers1

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The reasoning behind requiring a login is described in bug 784485. From the link:

This is being marked as won't fix, because this is a feature, not a bug. The pastebin was being abused as a way to host objectionable content, iirc and this feature was implemented to stop that.

[...]

Ralph, sadly, you are right. It is unfortunate that the abuse made us limit the features. There are other services that allow what you need. It is probably best to use that.

So the Ubuntu Pastenbin was being used by spammers and such, which is why it now requires a login in order to view the plaintext.

The only alternative would be to use a different pastebin service, or somehow extract the desired text from the HTML version (Using e.g. grep or sed).

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Jonas Czech
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  • As of 2022, this has now gotten even worse. You can't even view a paste without an Ubuntu One account. Really nukes the usefulness of the product. – Chris Apr 03 '22 at 22:46