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On the Future of 12ft

12ft.io

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Re: On the Future of 12ft

#61

Post by cplusplusfellow »

poopsmithe wrote: post #5

Well this is ironic. Well intentioned developer creates site to bypass paywalls. Site is a popular success, and begins to cost too much money for the developer to maintain. Developer comes up with a solution which is to introduce an optional paywall. I'm not just poking fun... I actually sympathize because I'm in a similar situation with one of my projects. I've had to reconsider being a 100% ideals-based person and…

I respect far more a site meant to bypass paywalls for shitnews that I probably will find laughable, but want to read.

Re: On the Future of 12ft

#62

Post by Karunamon »

mdoms wrote: post #22
jsmeaton wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then search engine crawlers should get paywalled too. The motivation is correct. You run a search on google and get mostly paywalled content. I'm fine with news sites requiring subscriptions to view their articles but they shouldn't also get the benefit of being listed at the top of search results for key terms. Alternatively, the search list should show if content is paywalled or give you search options to remove pa…

I'm not following your logic here. The Economist wants to charge readers because they produce high quality content that's worth paying for (in their estimation). This seems entirely orthogonal to whether they blacklist a web crawler - a crawler they didn't even ask for, which would be all over their website whether they want it or not. I think you're confused because the crawler and the browser both use the same chan…

You're a couple lines of robots.txt from not having your site appear in search engines most people use. Meanwhile, putting something up on the open internet includes the risk that people and robots will see it.

Re: On the Future of 12ft

#65

Post by HWR_14 »

ketzo wrote: post #54

This person is asking for money in order to help provide a service… and that service is “stop other people from asking for money to provide a service.” Hard not to feel a little irony. There are approximately three outcomes here. 1. Google shuts this guy down, some way or another 2. Paywalled sites sue this into oblivion Or worst of all , 3. Google stops being able to usefully surface decent news content. Paywalls ar…

How is "Google isn't allowed to scrap site to power their site for free" the worst option. Google can write a few checks to access the data. They have enough money.

Re: On the Future of 12ft

#66

Post by fastball »

poopsmithe wrote: post #5

Well this is ironic. Well intentioned developer creates site to bypass paywalls. Site is a popular success, and begins to cost too much money for the developer to maintain. Developer comes up with a solution which is to introduce an optional paywall. I'm not just poking fun... I actually sympathize because I'm in a similar situation with one of my projects. I've had to reconsider being a 100% ideals-based person and…

I made a website for piracy when I was a kid and did the exact same thing; was definitely ironic for people to pay for something to avoid paying.

But I think it always has been and will continue to be more of a UX problem than a "wanting stuff for completely free" problem.

Case in point, a couple hours ago I tried to stream the Super Bowl from the official NFL website, but failed multiple times to finish their checkout process (which was only $0.99, well below what I would've been willing to pay), so instead I... went elsewhere.

Re: On the Future of 12ft

#67

Post by dreamcompiler »

isiahl wrote: post #36
Swizec wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't do it client side. Well-implemented paywalls clip the content server-side. If you're Google, you get the full HTML, if you're not, you don't.

But I could change my clients User Agent to match the Google Crawler?

Nope. Because your IP address is not one of Google's. This trick worked years ago but not today.

Re: On the Future of 12ft

#68

Post by makeworld »

gzer0 wrote: post #13

How is 12ft Ladder any different than this Github repo that does the same thing? This is one of the more popular repos as well at 22k stars. Genuinely curious, as I've just been using [1] and have had no issues bypassing paywalls. If 12ft has access to more sites, or something, that would be a better use case. The owner of the repo does not even want donations, just a star, otherwise, I'd contribute! [1] https://gith…

It's not any different. It actually can access fewer sites, since some sites have disabled it, presumably by paying the owner? The only advantage of 12ft.io is that you have a shareable link for friends, and that it can be used on mobile.

Btw, you should switch the better maintained version of the Bypass Paywalls extension: https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean

Re: On the Future of 12ft

#69

Post by makeworld »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #19

> How does it work? > The idea is pretty simple, news sites want Google to index their content so it shows up in search results. So they don't show a paywall to the Google crawler. We benefit from this because the Google crawler will cache a copy of the site every time it crawls it. > All we do is show you that cached, unpaywalled version of the page. This seems like something that could be accomplished entirely clie…

You're not missing anything, it can be done fully client-side.

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

Re: On the Future of 12ft

#70

Post by makeworld »

Swizec wrote: post #35
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #19

> How does it work? > The idea is pretty simple, news sites want Google to index their content so it shows up in search results. So they don't show a paywall to the Google crawler. We benefit from this because the Google crawler will cache a copy of the site every time it crawls it. > All we do is show you that cached, unpaywalled version of the page. This seems like something that could be accomplished entirely clie…

You can't do it client side. Well-implemented paywalls clip the content server-side. If you're Google, you get the full HTML, if you're not, you don't.

This is false. I use this extension every day and it works great. There are many ways to bypass paywalls. For example, you can pretend to be Google.

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

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