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Bypass Paywall — Down with the walls
Bypass Paywall is a browser extension that allows you to read content that is behind a paywall on websites or blogs etc. What this extension does is show you the cached version of the website without the paywall.
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Replies
Sagar
Congrats on the launch @sagarchauhan!!
Bypass paywall is indeed helpful :) Also just curious what all websites can be bypassed by installing this?
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Hey @sagar_devkate, it would work with almost all the websites, except a few which only do premium publishing directly to their subscribers via newsletters or email such as The Ken, Morning Context, etc.
And it won't work for a very simple reason, that they don't expose their article/post to any kind of crawler like google, bing, etc for search page listing.
Doing so, they prevent any kind of cached version of the article to exist over the internet without any paywall. But even these websites do open their few articles to crawlers after an interval so that too should be available to bypass.
Hope you get the reasoning behind this. Please try it and do share your feedback, if any.
Regards
@sagarchauhan Awesome, I think it would be just nice to have a little directory of sites that can be bypassed using this as your Usp :)
Hey @janinah, couldn't get your exact context here, will you elaborate a bit. But to the best of my understanding, I can tell you that the extension makes using 12ft.io easier from any website, rather than going to a dedicated website by copying the URL and then pasting to view the article behind. It just automates that manual step.
Would love to hear from you about this in more detail.
@sagarchauhan What I meant was rather than have this as a chrome extension as not everyone uses Chrome. It should be like 12ft.io - In that you put in the Url then the URL of the site you're trying to access like you do with 12ft.io. e.g. 12ft.io/prducthunt.com
@janinah Ok, got you now. I can understand that to solve the problem for multiple browser a single site could be a solution but that's a painful user experience to load a site everytime, not many would want to do.
People want simple one-click solution, that's why Chrome Extension, but I get it the next question is what about Firefox, Opera, Edge or Brave browser users.
I am planning to create the same extension for Firefox as well and as per my understanding that would cover a large chunk of browser users atleast the major chunk of it. That should be good enough.
So this happens, you come across a good article on your feed, you click on it fully excited to read it, you land up on the website and start reading it. You seem to be enjoying it but a few scrolls later, you realize it's paywalled. Dayuuuummmmm !!!
It seems all kinds of good articles have started to go behind the paywall and I fully understand the reason behind it. Good writing needs to be supported financially.
But as a user, you simply can't have a subscription to 10's of services or websites that you like to read articles or news on.
And most of the time, the service might just be churning out too few good articles, or maybe they have just a few good writers who write on a fortnightly basis, in such scenarios you simply can't decide to pay for all the services and subscription on monthly basis.
It is great, that these services have paywalled it but what these services also do is, before taking their content behind a paywall, they generally expose it to Crawlers for cache or keep them always open for crawlers in some way to cache it.
This extension makes use of that route to provide you unrestricted access to the content, completely legally.
All you have to do is, install the extension and click on it when you are on a paywalled content and you shall have a new link with unfettered access.
Hope you like this. Please share your feedback.