41–50 of 165 posts
Really dummy question: how do services like this work? As in, how do they bypass these paywalls? The obvious thing is to mock Googlebot, but site owners can check that the request isn't coming from a Google-published IP and see that it's a fake, right?
Open source makes it easy for the cat in the cat mouse game, right?
There's no real cat & mouse game here (yet*) - sites don't do anything to mitigate this. Sites deliberately make their content available to robots to gain SEO traction: they're left with the choice of allowing this kind of bypass or hurting their own SEO. * I say "yet" because there could conceivably be ways to mitigate this, but afaik most would involve individual deals/contracts between every search engine & every…
Relevant: 12ft.io was banned by Vercel, taking down the developer's entire account with multiple other hosted projects & domains: https://twitter.com/thmsmlr/status/1718663563353755982 Edit: Access to other projects & domains was apparently restored some time after: https://twitter.com/thmsmlr/status/1719480558932148272
Taking down all his projects (not just 12ft) is heavy-handed, but otherwise Guillermo’s response in that thread seems pretty reasonable to me: > Hey Thomas. Your paywall-bypassing site broke our ToS and created hundreds of hours of support time spent on all the outreach from the impacted businesses. > Our support team reached out to you on Oct 14th to let you know this was unsustainable and to try to work with you.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lovely, the Google classic "ban the world" approach -- I've been desperately trying to move my client off of vercel, this might just be the gasoline.
One might consider Cloudflare as a very nice competitor to Vercel in terms of DX, although I suspect all companies use a ban the world approach, even banks.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't even need to install it, just add it as an import line to UO, Google how. Game changing.
What's UO? This would've been a great comment with a little more info :)
After install go to "Filter Lists" > Import ... > and add the url of the "list"... which is actually from a different repo: https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-clean-filter...
Note: this apparently works for fewer sites than the linked extension.
Really dummy question: how do services like this work? As in, how do they bypass these paywalls? The obvious thing is to mock Googlebot, but site owners can check that the request isn't coming from a Google-published IP and see that it's a fake, right?
related: If this is how they work, why doesn't google offer a private service to allow publishers to have content indexed while still protected?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aside from this (which is already very shitty and would cause the same response in me) what are the issues you’re running into with Vercel?
- Support is failing us - I want my team to use you for vercel support, but it isn't there. - Support is failing our customers - when you fail, I end up reverse-depending your repo to tell us why it's failing -- just give us a clear answer, we all move away happy, bullshit and I go to lambda where I just accept it. - EOD: Vercel makes engineers happy to bullshit, but gives operations teams nothing acceptable - I want…
For folks like me who have no idea what 12ft.io or 1ft.io are, they appear to be services for bypassing paywalls on websites.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Taking down all his projects (not just 12ft) is heavy-handed, but otherwise Guillermo’s response in that thread seems pretty reasonable to me: > Hey Thomas. Your paywall-bypassing site broke our ToS and created hundreds of hours of support time spent on all the outreach from the impacted businesses. > Our support team reached out to you on Oct 14th to let you know this was unsustainable and to try to work with you.
The 12ft guy doesn’t look so great in that thread. He admits to ignoring the email (gosh I was busy mmkay?) and then argues that Vercel is lying about the extra work they had to do.
Mischaracterization much? He was on Vacation.
How many of us read every email for personal projects that comes in when you're half way across the world and supposed to be relaxing.