Without a notification in advance, Mozilla has removed the popular Bypass Paywalls Clean extension for Firefox from the addons.mozilla.org (AMO) catalog. As per extension's developer, the removal happened due to a DMCA claim. This makes impossible to restore the add-on in AMO in the future.
The removed extension was widely used to bypass the Paywall restrictions on many websites. A Paywall is a special technique that reveals certain posts on a website to only bots, such as search indexers by Google and Bing, and social media bots. For the rest of visitors it only appears after they pay for a subscription.
The extension made the website think that it is a bot visiting the website, so the original post appears as a full-pledged text. Prior to the removal, the add-on had 145 000 active users.
Interested users still can install an XPI file from author's GitLab here. Sadly, Mozilla has already made it harder to install a Firefox extension from anywhere outside their add-on catalog. You can learn more on this topic in this post: Firefox will get the Load Temporary add-ons feature.
Also, Nightly and Developer editions of Firefox allow you to sideload any add-ons.
Finally, uBlock Origin users can attach a custom filter to their extension. uBlock Origin can handle the filter created for the Bypass Paywalls Clean add-on, which is hosted on GitLab as well. Check out this link:
https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-clean-filters
There, you will find the bpc-paywall-filter.txt file and a quick tutorial on how to connect it to popular add-ons.
If you are a Chrome/Edge user, the author has a special version for Chromium based web browsers. You will find it here.
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