Remove paywalls with 12ft.io

[jdaviescoates]

https://12ft.io is awesome - it quickly and easily removes most paywalls by serving up a Google cache of the page instead (because of course people want the Google crawler to be able to access and index their site, even if they have a paywall)

Just put 12ft.io/ at the beginning on a paywalled site URL and you can nearly always access it

[humptydumpty]

For premium news sites where the article loads and then the paywall pop up kicks in, i use the clean reading mode button in Firefox right before the paywall loads and it fetches the whole page. Makes me chuckle each time.

[jdaviescoates]

@humptydumpty said in Remove paywalls with 12ft.io:

i use the clean reading mode button in Firefox right before the paywall loads and it fetches the whole page. Makes me chuckle each time.

Yeah, I've used the trick quite a few times too.

Another good one is to search the title on Google Alerts and then click through on there.

But 12ft.io works better than either of those methods.

[sentinel65]

This Firefox extension lets you Bypass Paywalls without having to use any tricks or hacks. It works awesome.

https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clean

[LoudLemur]

@jdaviescoates Another option, and there is an Application Request, is to check if there is an archived version on the internet:

https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/6353/archivebox-on-cloudron-self-hosted-webpage-archiving?_=1683009534265

Apart from being able to read the page, there are no trackers and the ads are generally not so bad. By self-hosting an archiving service, one is able to defeat censorship and help preserve valuable content on the internet.

[chetbaker]

12ft is offline now.

there's a self hosted version I'm pitching for having it here at Cloudron

[timconsidine]

@chetbaker that would be great