Do you folks have any tips on how to get around magazine and newspaper paywalls? It seems like the old tricks are becoming less reliable and it’s frustrating - especially given paywalls seem to be becoming more stringent at the same time.
Check 12ft.io
Oh my god, I totally thought 12ft.io was just for academic papers and journals. I tried it on The Atlantic (one of the worst in my experience) and it worked like a charm.
It has worked on everything I’ve tried so far.
This is.something I saw on a community here and was surprised it works reasonably well.
I tried it on two sites - New York Times and Financial Times. NYT gives the error message “12ft has been disabled for this site” and FT doesn’t remove the paywall. Nice idea, shame about the execution. :)
I had the same issue with NYT, but I managed to get in using archive.is! :)
Web archives extension for Firefox. Click it and select to open on archive.is. Alternatively, go to archive.is manually and paste your link. If it has been archived already it’ll load right up. If it hasn’t, then you submit it and it’ll take a little bit but with be available shortly.
Have you tried the Bypass Paywalls Clean extension? There’s a version for Chrome and Firefox. It works for many sites but not everything. I think Firefox removed it from their add-ons repository but you can install it manually. There’s a good article on that decision here and also a method to use uBlock Origin for this purpose.
It has indeed been removed from Firefox’s add-on store. I’ll look at the alternatives you gave, thank you. :)
Just FYI, from this article “Interested users still can install an XPI file from author’s GitLab here.”
This method is how I installed the latest version on Firefox, because the original one was no longer updating.
There is a GitHub with the list, and it’s compatible with ublock origin, so you can block ads and paywalls
Wait. I have “Bypass Paywalls”. Are they the same thing or is one better than the other?
I don’t think so, my version has the full name: “Bypass Paywalls Clean”
Oh ok, will check that out. Thanks!
The old tricks are becoming less reliable because the magazines, recognizing that those methods undermine their money making, switched from “paywall” to “members only”.
Back in the day, a paywall was nothing more that a “thing” that was displayed between you and the paywalled content. The content was still there, you just had to pay to literally remove the wall between you and it. “The old tricks” mainly work by detecting what is content and what is wall and removing the wall so that you can see the content.
Nowadays though, many sited don´t even load the paywalled content in unless you are logged into your subscription account. And what content isn´t loaded in the first place also can´t be magically made to appear from behind the wall. It´s not so much like the content is behind a wall, it´s more like you leave the original building all together, get blindfolded and driven to a secret location and only there will the actually bring out the content.
What about the “Bypass Paywalls Clean” addon? Doesn’t that work any more? Also, there seems to be a “Bypass Paywalls Clean” filter list in Brave by default that just needs to be enabled. Anyone tried that one?
Yep, works fine (afaik)!
Lol snap
My method that works on most sites is hit the reader mode button in Firefox, then refresh while in reader mode.
I can’t even figure out how to make a post on the piracy community. It keeps saying it’s unclear what community I’m trying to post to.
It seems as though I can post fine on every other community in this instance.
Still better than reddit.
none of the methods mentionned here would work on LeMonde https://www.lemonde.fr/
One thing is learning how to manually do it from your browser.
F12 brings up the console, which lets you inspect the page. For some, the paywall is a shitty <div> that you can remove by selecting it on the console and hitting DELETE key. If you ever mess up the whole site, refresh and try again.
In other cases, you have to disable the page’s javascript. Firefox + NoScript makes this very easy. The problem is that many sites simply don’t work at all without javascript, everything is loaded from there.
Might not work with every site, since the smarter ones don’t load the full content unless you’re a paying member, so you can get rid of the paywall, but the full thing won’t load anyway.
There is also https://www.removepaywall.com/
There have been instances where 12ft.io hasn’t worked and I found this workaround for chrome (tinker for your browser of choice)
-
F12 for developer tools (or 3 dots for chrome)
-
Run Command (Ctrl + Shift + P)
-
Type “Java” > Disable Java script
-
F5 refresh
What this does is disable all the java based popups which just so happens to be paywall prompts.
-
You can try looking at the archived version through Google if it’s a little bit older.
Any media with a paywall it’s not for trust in my humble POV.
