Hello! I am a new Self-hosting user. Currently only looked into FTR and it works quite well so far. I am wondering however if it is capable of handling paywalled content. I am talking about hard-paywalls like for zeit.de, if I am a paying customer there. I did’t find any starting point on the web site or in the forum. Is it possible with FTR or with the Feed Creator? Thanks!
Servus @Savard Willkommen im Forum.
Most paywalled sites can’t be handled by FTR to catch full articles.
A few websites, using a simple cookie to recognize an already logged-in user, can be handled. For example heise.de is using a cookie named ssohls. So if your are a subscriber of a magazine produced by heise you can get full text feeds by adding the cookie to heise.de.txt of your server.
- open a webbrowser, log in to heise
- rightclick somewhere in the text > “inspect” (untersuchen)
- depending on your browser, search the config tab where you can see all cookies for this site
- copy the cookie with name ssohls
- make sure to never log out the user in browser (remove cookies instead) or this cookie will get revoked
- add the following line to heise.de.txt of your FTR server. Be sure to strip the “quotation” ‘marks’ from cookie.
http_header(cookie): ssohls=abc..............................xyz
for other websites you may try to add more then one cookie to their site configs:
http_header(cookie): cookiename1=abc; cookiename2=def; cookiename3=xyz
But I don’t believe that you will succeed here with major news pages as Zeit or Spiegel. But if you do, it would be nice, if you’d share your findings with us.
Danke Holger! I assume there is the same problem when using the Feed Generator?
FC (Feed Control) is similar. It is loading an overview/landing page, as a non-logged-in user will get it, and try to identify the single articles out of this. Optionally it tries to get the full text by sending the article URL to FTR. Technically the FC-generated feed URL is send to FTR.