Show me a 10ft paywall, I’ll show you a 12ft ladder

"I believe Google Adwords killed the web because it incentives SEO optimized garbage", then proceeds stripping publishers of their ability to get paid for quality non ads-financed content. The motivation makes little sense to me.

Shameless plug (Founder here), but I’d highly recommend checking out [redacted] as an alternative!<p>We work on a number of major publications that 12ft does not, including NYT, WSJ, and several others. We have a full list of supported publications here: [link redacted]

“Discussed” previously: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28784427" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28784427</a><p>It no longer works on some sites like nyt - The site was offline for a day because of a legal notice.

Awesome, though I wouldn&#x27;t have chosen to host it in Walnut, California. Pretty sure this will be a target for lawyers soon.

I know where you are coming from, but ultimately its another blow against quality journalism. It started with ad revenue moving from media to tech, and now the hacking community makes it harder for them to sell their products on the Internet. The deck is stacked against media - think about how much they need to to exactly right in order to survive the Internet era

What about 11ft 8in?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Norfolk_Southern–Gregson_Street_Overpass" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Norfolk_Southern–Gregson_Stree...</a>

This is great, because when I search something, can see a sentence in the search results relevant to my search, then click the link and cannot see the portion of the page relevant to the search, I can go to 12ft.io.<p>The showing of a special site to the search bot to add noise to search results and waste my time, I happily bypass with a clear conscience.

It’s inconvenient but why do we have the expectation that people will give away their work for free?<p>Journalism is not easy and journalists currently don’t have any other way to collect income other than publishing their work through a medium.<p>For some of us we afford to give away work for free because our universities (work=scientific publications) or our employer (work=open source software) pay for for it to be free for their own reasons and because they have the funding to do so.<p>We don’t want journalism to have questionable sources of funding, just so that we click open the stories more easily.<p>We want journalism to be profitable by direct funding from the consumers.<p>Ads was the unfortunate middle ground.<p>But taking Ads away will only push media towards getting funded by forces that exclusively want to control the media.<p>TLDR: pay your content creators even if it seems tedious to you

I tried it and got &quot;12ft has been disabled for this site&quot;. I guess the paywall was taller than the ladder! :D

I built a Bardeen playbook that bypasses paywalls by redirecting to an archived version of the paywalled page<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bardeen.ai&#x2F;posts&#x2F;how-to-bypass-a-paywall#bardeen" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bardeen.ai&#x2F;posts&#x2F;how-to-bypass-a-paywall#bardeen</a>.<p>Disclaimer: I’m the co-founder of Bardeen.

The &quot;paywall free&quot; version <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;12ft.io&#x2F;12ft.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;12ft.io&#x2F;12ft.io&#x2F;</a> looks odd...<p>Would be cool if it returned a simple text page saying &quot;I see what you did there.&quot;

Couldn’t get it to work on Bloomberg, it takes me to “Are you a bot?” page

This doesn&#x27;t seem to work on Firefox mobile for me. I was trying with nyt. Similar services like outline.com also have a difficult time with nyt, so unsurprising but would love a workaround.

Doesn&#x27;t work on WSJ

Do sites still show google the full articles? Why would they want that, they should be relevant enough with just the first few paragraphs and not need the complexity.

Or just use this plugin to bypass most paywalls.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;bypass-paywalls-clean&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;bypass-paywal...</a>

Doesn&#x27;t work for <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;12ft.io&#x2F;proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thetimes.co.uk%2Farticle%2Fpriti-patel-blocked-sajid-javid-s-plan-to-force-councils-to-take-in-afghan-refugees-5n7pjbwlf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;12ft.io&#x2F;proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thetimes.co.uk%2Fa...</a><p>Probably means that I won&#x27;t use it as everything else gets bypassed with this addon <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;bypass-paywalls-clean&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;bypass-paywal...</a><p>That addon actually gives me an archive.org link to read the times article in full.

dunno if the authors read this post, but it fails on<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.autonews.com&#x2F;sales&#x2F;us-dec-sales-seen-falling-retail-stocks-continue-slow-rebound" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.autonews.com&#x2F;sales&#x2F;us-dec-sales-seen-falling-ret...</a>

I’ve not tried this service yet, I’m curious though.<p>However, the easiest trick to bypass paywalls in my opinion is to switch to ‘reader’ mode in your browser. This works for most news sites I visit, including NYT. There are exceptions, but I reader mode should be your go to first attempt if you ask me.<p>It’s built into every browser now, and if it doesn’t work, then check archive.org. Using these two methods alone will get you most anything you want to read.

Thank you for building this. It still needs some work; a lot of links are broken on the displayed page.<p>I&#x27;d also point out an alternative: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;iamadamdev&#x2F;bypass-paywalls-chrome" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;iamadamdev&#x2F;bypass-paywalls-chrome</a>

archive.is is good too

There are many paywalls not so easy to bypass as removing a hovering modal, spoofing User-Agent and Referrer or redirecting to Wayback Machine or Google Cache.<p>There is a wellknown paywall-cleaning browser extension and it fails to bypass a lot. Issue list here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitlab.com&#x2F;magnolia1234&#x2F;bypass-paywalls-firefox-clean&#x2F;-&#x2F;issues?scope=all&amp;state=all" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitlab.com&#x2F;magnolia1234&#x2F;bypass-paywalls-firefox-clea...</a>

One more point: I predict in 2022 that sites stop allowing Google to index their content via bot. Paywall sites are going to ride that business model all the way down in flames.

* Not working for CNBC pro content.

Would you like to opensource this?

Tried on NYT and does not work…

text.fish is still down. :(

I just go to the way back machine when I want to view paywalled content.

I love this. Paywalls and anti—adblock must be defeated.

I think the background image of breaking chains of bondage is a bit melodramatic and off-putting for a site used to circumvent paywalls.

Sorry, hacking a paywall is just helping to kill the parts Adwords didn&#x27;t kill.

Can god build a paywall so high that even god can&#x27;t read the pages behind it?

&quot;You ought to be able to search something on Google and get an answer to your question without signing up for some newsletter.&quot;<p>Call me a cynic but they probably just want you to pay for their journalism. Looks like a cool product, and it&#x27;s also probably piracy.

As much as I hated AMP this is one thing I loved about it. Click an article, get paywalled… Google the article headline and it’d take you to a paywall-free AMP version of the full article.