Research and privacy

Stirkbin is an experimental text-sharing service studying how people and automated tools use public posting services.

What is recorded

Published content is stored to serve your paste and retained indefinitely in a private operator-only research archive. Request metadata is logged for seven days to study automated use, including request time, route, status, user agent, and referrer. A daily keyed pseudonymous visitor identifier groups requests; raw IP addresses are not persisted. Treat anything you submit as public. Do not include passwords, API tokens, private keys, personal information, or confidential work.

Edits and forks

Every saved revision of a paste is public at the paste’s link until the paste is deleted or expires, and every revision is also copied into the private research archive, alongside the original. Editing does not remove earlier text from either place. A fork is a new paste, archived the same way, and the archive records which paste it came from.

Unlisted pastes

Unlisted is not private. An unlisted paste is left out of the recent list, the archive page, search, feeds, and sitemaps, but anyone with the link can read it. It is stored, logged, and kept in the private research archive exactly like any other paste, and the operator can read it. There are no private pastes on this service.

Reports

When you report a paste, your category and reason are stored for the operator to read, kept in the private research archive, and linked to the request metadata described above. Do not include secrets in a report.

View counts

Each paste has a public count of views: one per visitor, per paste, per day. The count itself is kept with the paste. The check that stops double counting uses the daily visitor identifier, is held in memory, and is not written to disk.

Expiry and deletion

Pastes never expire by default. You can choose an expiry of 10 minutes, 1, 24, or 48 hours, 1 week, or 1 month at submission. Your private delete token can remove a paste from public access sooner. Expiry and deletion remove public access, including to earlier revisions; the private research archive retains the submitted text and submission timestamps indefinitely. Request metadata remains for up to seven days; it does not include paste content. Deleting a paste cannot remove copies others may have made.

Your browser

When you publish through the editor, your browser stores the paste’s delete token in local storage on this device. The token is used only to let you edit or delete that paste, and to build the My pastes list, which fetches titles by paste ID and stays on this device. No account is required. The editor also keeps an unsent draft in local storage so a closed tab doesn’t lose it, and your theme and line-wrap choices are kept there too. Drafts and files you open in the editor are not sent to the server until you submit. If you submit the form without JavaScript, a cookie lasting at most five minutes carries the token to the next page so it can be shown to you once; it is not stored or logged.

A new service

This site operates under new ownership. It is not the original Stirkbin service or its archive, and it does not provide historical pastes.