Hastebin: Streamlining Bug Reports at Athion

How a simple paste service transformed our bug reporting workflow and developer collaboration at a Minecraft server company.

The Challenge

At Athion.net, we ran a creative Minecraft server that attracted builders, plugin developers, and a passionate community. With custom plugins like FastAsyncWorldEdit and PlotSquared running on the server, bugs were inevitable—and often difficult to reproduce.

The typical bug report cycle was frustrating:

1. Player encounters a bug
2. Player tries to describe it in Discord or forum post
3. Developer asks "what were you doing when it happened?"
4. Player doesn't remember the exact sequence
5. Developer can't reproduce the issue
6. Bug lingers unresolved

We needed a way to capture the exact server state, recent commands, and error logs at the moment a bug occurred—not hours later when the player finally got around to reporting it.

The Approach

The /debug Command

We built a custom /debug command that players could run immediately after encountering a bug:

/debug "The paste brush isn't applying blocks correctly"

This single command would:

• Capture player context - Current location, active tools, recent commands, permission nodes
• Grab server logs - Last 100 lines of console output filtered for relevant errors
• Record server state - Memory usage, TPS (ticks per second), loaded chunks, active async tasks
• Include the complaint - The player's description in their own words

Self-Destructing Pastes

The captured data was automatically uploaded to our self-hosted Hastebin instance with a twist: pastes were set to auto-expire 90 days after the last view. This served multiple purposes:

• Privacy - Sensitive player data wouldn't linger indefinitely
• Storage - Our paste server didn't grow unbounded with abandoned pastes
• Longevity for active issues - Frequently-viewed pastes stayed alive as long as they were needed

XenForo Integration

The real magic happened in the integration with our XenForo community forum at athion.net. When a player ran /debug:

1. Debug data was uploaded to Hastebin first
2. A new thread was automatically created in a private "Bug Reports" section
3. The thread contained only the Hastebin link—not the raw logs
4. Staff were notified immediately
5. The player received a confirmation with their ticket number

This separation was intentional: sensitive logs never lived in the forum database. The forum thread was a permanent record of the bug report, but the actual diagnostic data—which might contain player IPs, session tokens, or other sensitive information—existed only in the auto-expiring Hastebin paste. Engineers could review it privately, and after 90 days of inactivity, it disappeared automatically.

[AutoBugReport] Bug report #1247 created!
View at: https://athion.net/forums/bug-reports/1247/
Diagnostic logs: https://haste.athion.net/abc123
(Logs expire 90 days after last view)

Technical Implementation

Plugin Architecture

The debug command was implemented as a Bukkit/Spigot plugin:

@CommandAlias("debug")
public class DebugCommand extends BaseCommand {
    @Default
    public void onDebug(Player player, @Optional String complaint) {
        // Gather all diagnostic data
        DebugSnapshot snapshot = DebugSnapshot.builder()
            .player(player)
            .serverState(ServerDiagnostics.capture())
            .recentLogs(LogCapture.getRecent(100))
            .complaint(complaint != null ? complaint : "No description provided")
            .build();
        
        // Upload to Hastebin asynchronously
        hasteClient.upload(snapshot.toJson()).thenAccept(url -> {
            // Create XenForo thread via REST API
            forumClient.createBugReport(player, url, complaint);
            player.sendMessage("Bug report created! Check forums for updates.");
        });
    }
}

Hastebin Configuration

We ran a self-hosted Hastebin instance with custom expiration:

{
  "keyLength": 10,
  "maxLength": 500000,
  "staticMaxAge": 86400,
  "recompressStaticAssets": true,
  "storage": {
    "type": "redis",
    "expire": 7776000,
    "expireOnGet": true
  }
}

The Redis backend handled the 90-day sliding expiration—each page view reset the timer, so actively-referenced pastes stayed alive indefinitely while abandoned ones were automatically cleaned up.

Results & Impact

Quantifiable Improvements

• Bug resolution time dropped from an average of 5 days to 1.5 days
• "Unable to reproduce" responses decreased by 80%
• Player satisfaction with bug handling improved measurably in community surveys
• Developer productivity increased as they spent less time asking clarifying questions

Adoption Beyond Athion

The pattern we established spread to other server networks in the Minecraft community. The combination of instant diagnostic capture, auto-expiring pastes for privacy, and forum integration for tracking became a template that others adapted for their own communities.

Evolution: Adopting and Extending Hastebin

The lessons from Athion's debugging workflow influenced me so much that I eventually adopted the Hastebin project itself. I refactored the codebase, modernized the deployment, and now run my own production instance at haste.nixc.us.

From User to Maintainer

What started as self-hosting someone else's tool became a full adoption:

• Refactored the codebase for modern deployment and maintainability
• Built a custom server stack optimized for my infrastructure
• Extended the API to support new use cases like markdown rendering

Powering md.colinknapp.com

The Hastebin instance at haste.nixc.us now serves as the backend for my markdown rendering tool at md.colinknapp.com. When you paste markdown into that tool, it's stored and retrieved via my hastebin infrastructure—the same technology that powered Athion's debugging workflow, now repurposed for developer productivity.

haste-it CLI Tool

To complete the workflow, I built a command-line tool called haste-it that enables piping stdout directly to my hastebin servers: git.nixc.us/Nixius/haste-it

# Pipe any command output to hastebin
cat error.log | haste-it
# Output: https://haste.nixc.us/abc123

# Pipe build failures for sharing
npm run build 2>&1 | haste-it

# Upload a file directly
haste-it debug-output.txt

# Chain with other tools for instant sharing
kubectl logs pod-name | haste-it

This tool is designed for the same use case we had at Athion: instantly capturing output at the moment it's relevant and sharing it with minimal friction.

MCP Integration

The hastebin service now supports Model Context Protocol for AI integration:

• Hastebin MCP: haste.nixc.us/.well-known/mcp.json
• Markdown Service MCP: md.colinknapp.com/.well-known/mcp/server-card.json

These endpoints allow AI assistants and automation tools to interact with the paste services programmatically—a natural evolution of the original debugging workflow into the era of AI-assisted development.

Observations

1. Capture context immediately - The best time to gather debug data is the moment something goes wrong
2. Automate the boring parts - Players shouldn't have to manually copy logs or remember server states
3. Privacy by default - Auto-expiring data respects users while still enabling debugging
4. Integrate with existing workflows - Posting to forums where developers already looked made adoption seamless
5. Simple tools scale - Hastebin's simplicity made it easy to extend and integrate

Why I Still Love Hastebin

There's an elegance to Hastebin that modern "collaboration platforms" often lack. It does one thing—share text—and does it well. No accounts required, no bloated interfaces, just paste and share.

That simplicity made it perfect for the high-pressure moment when a player just lost hours of work to a bug and needed to communicate with developers quickly. And that same simplicity makes it perfect today for sharing logs, configs, and code snippets across any context.

The Athion debugging system was one of many small tools we built that made a big difference in how we operated. It taught me that the best developer tools often aren't the most sophisticated—they're the ones that remove friction at exactly the right moment.