It’s been a long time since I posted anything about openSUSE Paste. Frankly, there wasn’t much to write about. Last thing I wrote about was OpenID integration. And I found out, that not so many people actually use it or know about it. So I will post about it again sometime 😉 But more importantly there is Google Code-In running an I created task for openSUSE Paste and it is already completed! I have two more prepared for second round, so I hope there will be other improvements in near future as well 😉
Presets
During Sunday, my first Google Code-In student stepped in and finished my openSUSE Paste task. This task was about implementing presets in openSUSE Paste. How it works? Well basically we have openSUSE Paste for general audience, that has language set to text and expiration date to one week. But other people are using openSUSE Paste for more specialized use-cases. On of them is already covered and that is image pasting. But there is many more. So from now on, you can call openSUSE Paste with some arguments that will prefill the form. Let’s say, that I want link for people discussing packaging on #opensuse-buildservice. I need my pastes to last about an hour and I want language set to spec as packaging code is about spec files, right? So I will suggest my visitors to use http://susepaste.org/?expire=60&lang=rpmspec. On the other hand, we’ve got openSUSE forums, where pastes should last forever as they are googlable. So forums can use http://susepaste.org/?expire=-1 link. You can also prefill paste title, your nick or whole paste, but in these cases, as values might get complicated, you have to use base64 encoded values. You can take a look at whole patch if you are interested 😉
Other tasks
Are you interested in what else I have prepared as Google Code-In task for second round? One thing I wanted was to create a group of moderators that can delete posts from the web. No censorship (Ok, maybe a little), but to cleanup all the spam that pastebin is getting. I know that I can make spambots life harder, but I don’t want to make users life harder as well. So from time to time I have to go through database and delete spam. And it would be more convenient if I can do it just from openSUSE Paste web interface and if I could create a group of trustworthy people that can help me fight against spammers.
Other task I have in mind is creating non-openSUSE theme and make theme switchable. As openSUSE Paste evolves, I think it might be interesting for people looking for simple pastebin. But with hardcoded openSUSE theme not so much. Theme is hardcoded mostly because the first idea was just to have openSUSE branded pastebin. That was original plan. After that feature requests started coming and we ended up with fork that has several key features original software didn’t have. And I consider these features quite great 😉 So it would be nice if we could get other users and maybe contributors with new awesome features and fixes 😉