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.

Arguably the biggest problem with Wikipedia as it aged is the accumulation of dead links.

Brilliant move.

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.

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.

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.

I understand now. I completely missed the point.

I half thought this was archive.org they were blacklisting. Two whole different sites.

Here's the relevant archive.today guidance page on Wikipedia for anyone curious:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Archive.today_guidance

If 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.

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?

Ghostarchive is an archive.today revamp, I see no reason to not keep using either though...

Worth looking into, thanks.

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.

no, archive.today (and similar services like the Wayback Machine) work by fetching the page directly through their own servers, essentially acting as a headless browser that renders the page and saves a snapshot. the archive service itself makes the HTTP request, executes JavaScript, and captures the resulting document object model - no subscriber involvement required

they do exist: http://archivebox.io/

In emails sent to Patokallio after the DDoS began, “Nora” from Archive.today threatened to create a public association between Patokallio’s name and AI porn and to create a gay dating app with Patokallio’s name. These threats were discussed by Wikipedia editors in their deliberations over whether to blacklist Archive.today, and then editors noticed that Patokallio’s name had been inserted into some Archive.today captures of webpages.

“Honestly, I’m kind of in shock,” one editor wrote. “Just to make sure I’m understanding the implications of this: we have good reason to believe that the archive.today operator has tampered with the content of their archives, in a manner that suggests they were trying to further their position against the person they are in dispute with???”

That and their refusal to talk to any journalist who references information about Patokallio’s blog makes archive.today unreliable.

Fuck them.

At first glance, this does not bypass paywalls. It archives web pages.

People conflate the two services because some of them bypass paywalls as they archive.

I specifically asked for about paywall bypass on purpose.

So there is no subscriber at all? How do they get past the wall that requires the payment?

It’s fun how I got a few replies, and none of the answered my very precise question.

the archiving mechanism itself is what bypasses paywalls. it archives by fetching pages server-side before client-side JavaScript enforces paywalls

soft paywalls are enforced by JavaScript running in your browser - the server sends the full article content regardless, and then the JavaScript checks if you’re a subscriber and hides or blocks it if not. when archive.today or a self-hosted tool like ArchiveBox fetches the page, it gets the full content directly from the server before any of that JavaScript enforcement runs. the server doesn’t know or care whether you’re a subscriber, it just responds to the request

Thanks!

I always assumed that wasn’t the case because Paywall bypass extensions are not linked in a reply when someone screams about paywalls in a thread on Reddit or Lemmy. Why is that possible, but not possible with a browser extension?

Are soft paywalls uncommon?

Can this be done in a browser extension? I’m basically wondering why people don’t tell other people about Paywall bypass software on Lemmy. Is it because it sucks? Doesn’t exist?

Such software seems like it would be very Lemmy, and very Linux, and very piracy, and very anarchic. So why am I not already aware of any?

F11 plus Esc stops script execution or something like that?

it absolutely can! there’s Bypass Paywalls Clean developed by magnolia1234. the reason you don’t see them shared often is that they’re repeatedly taken down from official extension stores like the Chrome Web Store and Firefox Add-ons, and platforms like GitHub, due to legal and political pressure from publishers, which pushes them to increasingly obscure and/or questionable hosting platforms that most normal users wouldn’t touch - case in point, Bypass Paywalls Clean itself is currently hosted on GitFlic, a Russian code hosting platform, as it’s been pushed outside the reach of Western legal frameworks

You'd think they would host on codeberg.

The thing that has always annoyed me about archive.is is that using Firefox + VPN seems to result in endless Captcha. But works in Chrome, go figure. I'm very suspicious of sites that somehow only work properly under Chrome.

Soft paywalls only exist on badly made sites (which make up a large part of all sites so it's still more effective than it has any right to be).

Many news sites with paywalls have a proper hard paywall. The only way to get around those is with an account or with an exploit. Neither of those two are going to be published for use in an extension though (as it'd get deactivated very fast).

Ah I see, thanks for the correction!