paste.ubuntu.com requires authorization to "download as text"

Fortunately there are other pastebins. I just switched to using Debian's.

The download as text facility in paste.ubuntu.com was getting actively
abused by spammers (and others) even long after we blocked people that
weren't directly referred from paste.ubuntu.com itself. We checked
the number of downloads using CLI tools like wget and the number was
absolutely tiny (3 total in several months). I'm sorry if it's an
inconvenience for you but as Scott so helpfully points out, there are
other pastebins available. If this is a serious problem for you for
some reason I'm overlooking or it's inconveniencing more people than
anticipated, I'm willing to revist this, but until then, I'm going to
mark this wontfix.

We've a number of development tools that preferentially post to paste.ubuntu.com. Would it be possible to only permit access to URIs including /plain/ to a whitelist that allows access without OpenID. I am inconvenienced by this several times a week, and suspect that your logs are either drawn from during the karmic cycle when I was essentially inactive or that somehow they did not catch my accesses.

I certainly don't want to encourage abuse, but if this can't be fixed, then it seems appropriate to adjust the development tools to prefer an alternate pastebin, and otherwise recommend that for use in Ubuntu Development.

Weird. You added a referer check and it was still getting abused somehow? What type of abuse, and what methods did they use? How do other pastebin sites deal with this type of thing?

As for wget, I have mine configured to identify as firefox...

Anyway, I get users complaining about this from time to time. Only a few so far, though.