blocked-page-recovery

# Blocked-Page Recovery When a page won't fetch — 403/429, Cloudflare "Just a moment...", a paywall, or a bot-detection interstitial — don't give up and don't loop on the same URL. Third-party services often hold a **copy** of the page. Work down this ladder, cheapest first. ## The ladder ``` 1. Wayback Machine — archive.org "available" API (snapshot + timestamp) 2. archive.today — domain rotation: archive.ph → .md → .li → .is 3. Jina Reader — only if JINA_API_KEY is set (live server-side render) 4. API-first pivot — look for /api/, /graphql, .json, or RSS on the same host 5. Real browser — browser tool as the last, most expensive resort ``` Run it in one shot with the bundled script: ```bash python3 scripts/recover_page.py "https://example.com/blocked-article" --json ``` The script tries each route in order, validates every body (see "Fake successes" below), and prints the first genuine hit with its provenance. ## Provenance discipline (non-negotiable) Every recovered copy carries a provenance you MUST preserve when citing: | Route | Provenance | How to cite | |-------|-----------|-------------| | Wayback / archive.today | `snapshot` | Cite WITH the snapshot date: "as archived 2026-08-06". Never present a snapshot as the live page — it may be stale. | | Jina Reader | `live` | Server-side re-render of the live page; cite normally. | | Live fetch / browser | `live` | Cite normally. | If the user needs *current* data (prices, availability, breaking news), a snapshot is context, not an answer — say so explicitly and note its age. ## Manual routes ### 1. Wayback Machine (best provenance, try first) ```bash # Discovery: returns closest snapshot URL + timestamp as JSON curl -sL "https://archive.org/wayback/available?url={URL}" # Then fetch archived_snapshots.closest.url ``` For enumerating many snapshots (or recovering deleted pages), the CDX index: ```bash curl -sL "https://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url={URL}&output=json&limit=10" ``` CDX intermittently returns 503 under load — if it does, fall back to the `available` API; don't retry-hammer it. Works for: any publicly crawled URL. Fails for: robots-blocked sites, never-crawled URLs, JS-only SPAs (snapshots don't render). ### 2. archive.today (paywalls, deleted content) User-submitted archives — often has paywalled news articles Wayback lacks. Rate-limits aggressively (429) and rotates domains, so iterate: ```bash for d in archive.ph archive.md archive.li archive.is; do curl -sL --max-time 20 "https://$d/newest/{URL}" -o ~/.hermes/cache/scratch/page.html \ -w "%{http_code}" && break done ``` **Validate the body, not the status code** — a 429 still ships several KB of rate-limit HTML that looks like a success to a size check alone. ### 3. Jina Reader (requires JINA_API_KEY) `r.jina.ai` re-renders the live page in a real browser server-side and returns markdown. Anonymous access is dead (401 → Turnstile); a key is required: ```bash curl -s -H "Authorization: Bearer $JINA_API_KEY" "https://r.jina.ai/{URL}" ``` Handles JS SPAs that archives can't. Skip this route entirely when the env var is unset. ### 4. API-first pivot WAFs protect the HTML surface far more aggressively than the data endpoints behind it. After 2-3 blocked attempts on a site, stop fighting the HTML and look for: - `/api/...`, `/graphql`, or `.json` variants of the page URL - An RSS/Atom feed (`/feed`, `/rss`, `<link rel="alternate">` in any copy you did recover) - A sitemap (`/sitemap.xml`) revealing canonical URLs that may not be gated ## Fake successes — routes that LIE These return HTTP 200 with a plausible body that is NOT the page. The script rejects them automatically; reject them manually too: - **Google Cache is dead** (since mid-2024). `webcache.googleusercontent.com` returns 200 + tens of KB, but it's a Google Search interstitial with a JS redirect, not a cache. Never use it. - **AMP caches** (`*.cdn.ampproject.org`) mostly return a ~300-byte `<title>Redirecting</title>` meta-refresh stub pointing back at the original (blocked) URL. Treating that as success creates a fetch loop. - **Rate-limit bodies**: archive.today 429 pages are multi-KB HTML. Check for the target's actual content (title words, expected strings), not just size. Detection heuristics the script applies: body under a per-route byte floor; meta-refresh/JS-redirect stubs whose target is the original host; interstitial titles ("Just a moment", "Redirecting", "Google Search", "Attention Required"). ## Proxy relays: don't Generic "web proxy" relays are man-in-the-middle by construction. Never send cookies or Authorization headers through one, and don't use them for anything the user will rely on — provenance is unverifiable. Prefer archives, which at least timestamp their copies.