Crap. Obviously, I’m gonna gotta stop using archive.today, but it’s the only way around paywalls at numerous sites.
Removepaywalls.com (plural) inserts ads, often for shady operations.
Removepaywall.com (singular) usually works, but it’s tricky sharing the links (i.e., “choose option 2” or “choose option 4”).
Byebyepaywall.com has old, dead options.
Wayback Machine bombs out a lot.
And ghostarchive.org is successful so rarely it’s really a last resort.
Anyone know of any others?
Possibly irrelevant, but some browsers have a “reading mode” which, in conjunction with the ol’ Hitting F11 and Then Esc Trick, will produce the whole article before a paywall can finish loading.
Worth looking into, thanks.
Ghostarchive is an archive.today revamp, I see no reason to not keep using either though…
Is there a reason self hosted paywall bypass tools don’t exist? Is it because these services pay for access?
I think a subscribed user of the news site has to upload the “unlocked” article to the archive website.
Here’s the relevant archive.today guidance page on Wikipedia for anyone curious:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Archive.today_guidanceIf you have a Wikipedia account, you can help replace these links!
Go to the How you can help section, then click on the search links for any of the given domains, and you can go and manually re-archive any links with Archive.org, Ghostarchive, or Megalodon.I half thought this was archive.org they were blacklisting. Two whole different sites.
Absolute dumbass. Truly a self-own for the ages.
Play stupid games, …
Collect insurance?
Dammit. Everyone’s been using that site to get around paywalls because it works well. Now I have to go find another one that works as well. :|
There are others that don’t DDoS blogs.
Well, yes, I’ll be off looking for them next time I need to use an archival site. I’m bummed to learn this crap about archive.ph.
It works well because they use paid accounts to scrape a bunch of paywalled sites, which is why publishers are trying to figure out who runs it.
It’s completely untrustworthy now that they’ve shown that they can (and do) edit archived pages.
Arguably the biggest problem with Wikipedia as it aged is the accumulation of dead links.
Brilliant move.
I used to find dead links annoying until I realized that many dead links are also saved in the wayback machine. This comment isn’t only about Wikipedia.
Why do you need an archive of Wikipedia though? Each page retains its entire history, so you can easily go back to old versions without using a third-party site (especially one that DDoSes people)
Wikimedia also provide downloads of the whole of Wikipedia, including page history. You can easily have your own copy of the entirety of Wikipedia if you want to, as long as you’ve got enough disk space and patience to download it.
Edit: I’m an idiot but I’m leaving this comment here. I didn’t realise you meant dead links on Wikipedia, not to Wikipedia.
Wikipedia was using archive.today to link to off-wiki articles such as news articles, where the links had stopped working. Similar to how it also uses the archive.org Wayback machine for the same purpose.
I understand now. I completely missed the point.
