chesspastebin.com

What It Is

Chess Pastebin is a website dedicated to sharing chess games, positioned like a “Pastebin for game records.” Users can paste PGN games and generate accessible game pages for quick viewing and sharing. The site also displays recent games and historical content archived by month and year.

Core Features

Judging from the main content, the product is very focused: it saves and displays PGN chess games, supports an uploader name, and provides access via a fixed URL in the format /view/ID. For developers, the most important feature is its API: POST https://www.chesspastebin.com/api/add/, which returns an integer ID upon success. Parameters include the required apikey and pgn, as well as optional name and sandbox. Sandbox mode does not actually add new content, but it does run the usual validation, making it useful for debugging.

Pricing and Openness

The website does not show any formal paid plans. Instead, it mainly keeps the server running through donations to “buy a coffee or beer.” An API key must be requested by email from the site maintainer, which suggests it is more of a lightweight, personally maintained service than a fully commercialized developer platform. The main content does not state whether it is open source, nor does it provide any self-hosting deployment options.

Pros and Cons

The advantages are that it is simple, direct, and easy to learn. PGN is the common format used by chess software, so external tools can easily upload games and return shareable links. Although the API documentation is short, it includes the endpoint, method, return value, and parameters, which is enough for basic integration.

The limitations are also quite clear: the API only supports adding new games, with no visible capabilities for querying, updating, deleting, permission control, private sharing, rate limits, error codes, or sample code. API keys are requested by email, making it unsuitable for teams that need automated registration or large-scale integration. The documentation is usable but rather brief, with no mention of SDKs or ecosystem integrations.

Who It’s For and Access from China

It is suitable for chess players, coaches, clubs, and chess software developers who need temporary PGN sharing. It is not suitable as a complex tournament management system, private game-record database, or enterprise-level content platform. The main content does not provide information about access from mainland China, so this is unknown.