HACKER Q&A
📣 giuliomagnifico

What Happened to Outline.com?


www outline.com is offline/unreachable since about 10 days. It is/was(?) a very useful service to make some webpages more readable and (in some case) avoid the paywall. I also used it a lot of time to extract the "reader view" of some article to send it via email. But since 7-10 the website is down but domain looks okay. I'm also using a recursive DNS resolver so it's not blocked via DNS from my ISP.

Someone know what's going on? I haven't found other info.

Thanks

  👤 Zondor3000 Accepted Answer ✓
If you want to save a clean copy of a webpage, https://www.printfriendly.com/ works nicely, but some URLs are not supported. But sometimes, you can use https://tinyurl.com/ to create an spoof link which will process. Another good one is: https://pdf.fivefilters.org/ And of course, you should be reading the news with Firefox browser, so you can invoke the "Reader View" feature (very easy). This Firefox solution is the best, easiest fix to replace outline.com https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clu...
👤 ChrisArchitect
The OP is a question about what happened not looking for the hundred alternatives and add-ons there are out there. What happened?
👤 schnebbau
They probably got rekt by legal takedowns.
👤 frontman1988
12ft.io works
👤 dewey
It's a high value domain, maybe they sold it and it's in the process of being transferred?
👤 peapicker
Archive.is (etc) did it better?
👤 cheeze
Damn, I don't actually care about the paywalling, I just really liked their reader view.

I've been using Firefox. Reader view is decent.

👤 tartoran
RIP, it did a pretty good job at keeping reading distraction free. Hope it will make a comeback one day
👤 reddon1000
I would pay for this service. I follow articles all over the place, and it would be crazy to subscribe to each source as if I'm a specialist in that field. But I recognize that content was not created at no cost, and it's fair to pay something for it.
👤 kilroy123
What I do is use "_Bypass Paywalls Clean_" for Firefox, on my desktop. [1]

Then on my iPhone (safari), I use a handy little iOS shortcut that routes the page to archive.is and then shows the reader mode version. [2]

I used to use a cool shortcut for apple news that would also parse the URL, find the original article, and show it reader mode. Sadly, apple disabled sharing of News+ articles.

[1] https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clea...

[2] https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/81c670b532e340e38a35cc62e3e...

👤 dserodio
The domain does not look okay. There are no A or CNAME records, only NS (AWS) and MX (Google) records
👤 amelius
How would one build such a service in a way that is resilient against legal takedowns?
👤 godmode2019
Don't read the news it's bad for your health.