medium-paywall-bypass_skill

Overview

This skill fetches full Medium articles that are behind Medium's metered paywall by trying free mirror services in priority order. It prefers a direct mirror that returns article HTML and falls back to alternatives when the first option is blocked or empty. The skill extracts and returns the article text in a readable format.

How this skill works

Given a Medium or Medium-hosted publication URL, the skill constructs mirror service URLs (URL-encoding where required) and requests them in sequence until a usable response is obtained. The recommended path uses a mirror that returns content directly via a WebFetch-style HTTP fetch. Once content is retrieved, the skill extracts the article body and formats it for presentation (plain text or Markdown).

When to use it

• You have a Medium article URL that shows a paywall or clipped content.
• The article lives on a Medium-hosted domain (towardsdatascience, betterprogramming, etc.).
• You need a quick programmatic way to fetch the full article text for reading or analysis.
• You want a fallback sequence when the preferred mirror is unavailable.

Best practices

• Try the primary mirror first; it usually returns clean HTML suitable for extraction.
• URL-encode the full article URL when constructing mirror requests (slashes -> %2F, @ -> %40).
• If the primary mirror returns empty or blocked content, try secondary mirrors in order.
• If HTML looks garbled, re-run the fetch with instructions to extract and format as Markdown.
• Be mindful of legal and terms-of-service constraints when retrieving paywalled content.

Example use cases

• User shares https://medium.com/@user/article and you need the full article text.
• Bulk-processing a list of Medium-hosted article URLs for offline reading or NLP.
• Automated summarization pipeline that first needs the complete article body.
• Debugging why an article fetch returns truncated content and switching mirrors.