Due to some EXTREMELY badly behaved robot UA’s I’ve had to remove about 17k pastes from paste2.org, due to the exceptional load they put on the server. This is related to my earlier paste, I now know who it is and why, and all the data they were going after has been forcibly removed from the site.

Some things just aren’t worth the effort. This is one of those things.

It’s not the bandwidth, the CPU time or even frankly the illegality of what the content links to – it’s the fact that these idiots can’t write code that plays nice (well, they are Java developers, so what can you expect?), and on top of that – instead of using a real user agent which would give developers, server admins and the like (i.e. me, in this case) information about who it is doing the damage so it can be discussed and hopefully come to some kind of fix – they RANDOMISE their UA string.

If I may quote (and mangle) one of my favourite TV shows – “I let them play in my sandbox; and they went and shit in it”.

Please don’t ask me to restore these pastes, they’re gone forever. The risk was paste2 would become impossible for me to keep paying for out my own pocket.