FAQ

An attempt to answer frequently asked questions, and document the detail of site features. As with all software documentation, this is how the developer thinks these things work, to find out how things actually work, see the source code.

How do a register an account?

You can go here to register an account, although you can also post pastes and comments anonymously.

Parsers? What are those?

Parsers are the way you can style the text you post. While this software started as a pastebin clone, the need to style text better than pastebin.com quickly became apparent. Two parsers are currently available:

The plain parser

The goal of the plain parser is to format plain text exactly as you would expect it. It does not try to to anything fancy and tries to be faithful to the plaintext representation.

Imageboard parser

The imageboard parser delivers an approximation of Infinity markup, and will be familiar to those who have used imageboards before. The imageboard parser supports the following markup:

Surround text with double single-quotes(') to make text italic

Surround text with triple single-quotes to make text bold

Surround text with underscores(_) to make it underlined

Surround text with double asterisks(*) to make it spoilered

Surround text with tildes(~) to make it strike through

Begin a line with a greater-than followed by a space to make it

>greentext

Begin a line with a less-than followed by a space to make it

<pinktext

Surround text with forum-style [spoiler] and [/spoiler] tags as a second way to spoiler

Surround text with forum-style [code] and [/code] tags to make it 


Preformatted and monospace

If you have incomplete markup at the end, it shouldn't break anything, let me know if it does.

How does search work?

The search utility searches for stories on the site. At it's most simple, it searches stories based on tags, but it can also filter stories based on: title, author, date, and hits. In general, the syntax for search is +|-<field>>operator<>value<

The first + or - specifies weather to include or exclude results based on this search, the <field> specifies what field to search for (or search based on tag if this is missing), and <operator> specifies how to search.

For title, and author, the only allowed operator is =. This operator will search for the text appearing anywhere in the field, case insensitive. For hits and time, the allowed operators are >,<,>=, <=,=, which searches for greater than, less than, greater than or equal to, less than or equal to, and strictly equal to, respectively. Tag does not need a field or operator, and only allows exact matches. As a quirk of this system, it is impossible to search for the tags "author", "title", "hits" or "date", Examples: 

+author=admin -meta
Will return all stories by the users "admin" and "badminton_enthusiast" that do not include the "meta" tag. 
+hits>20 -date<=1609459201
Will return all stories with more than 20 hits that were posted before January 1, 2021 (unix timestamp 1609459201).
While the date field is a little hard to use for humans, it may be useful for robots.

How do I enable reader mode on my story?

Unfortunately, there is no web standard about how reader modes for different browsers work, and no way to hint to the browser that a page is readable. The site makes a best effort to trigger browsers into thinking a post is readable, but this is unreliable. In general, if reader mode is broken you just need to make your post a little longer.