Stack Overflow etiquette for sharing files and resources

Question

What are the rules/etiquette for giving files to other users that relate to a post. I have not seen any ability to add attachments to a post, but sometimes to give help, external files are needed.

I realize that taking a question/answer offline via email is very bad, and rightly so, but users may not always be able to put files and resources on the web where they can be accessed by everyone.

So I ask the community: What would be the best way to put up a file that is related to a post so that all users can benefit from it. Or, should it just be avoided all together?

Answer 1

For large source-code snippets I use PasteBin. For file attachments I usually just post a zip file on my own domain.

Answer 2

For sharing code snippets Pastebin is the standard usually and I really like Mathbin* for when you want to share pretty-latex math equations.

There are also multi-upload services (such as clonemyfile*) that submit your single file to several services such as Rapidshare, Easyshare, etc. These might be a good option because of the increase in redundancy. I hate nothing more than getting to a forum post or thread to find the source links are dead.

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Notes:

• The link to Mathbin has been reported dead since June 2015; see this sample capture instead. An alternative would be mathb.in or Quick Latex.

• The link to clonemyfile has been reported dead since December 2019; see this sample capture instead. You may attempt to build one locally.

Answer 3

It looks like FileDropper from the other answer doesn't work anymore.

I ended up going with mega.io. It has been around for a while so it is less likely to disappear. There is a 20gb limit for free accounts.