I'll keep that in mind, but it is not an answer to either of my questions.

Oh my god, I totally thought 12ft.io was just for academic papers and journals. I tried it on The Atlantic (one of the worst in my experience) and it worked like a charm.

I've never used Usenet... I'm really not familiar with it, tbh. I just DDL or stream everything lol.

It has indeed been removed from Firefox's add-on store. I'll look at the alternatives you gave, thank you. :)

Ah, and now I see where the miscommunication came from. I got all these sites from the r/Piracy megathread (which, I understand, is curated for safety and quality) and I browse with an antivirus and adblocker anyway. Sketchiness is not my primary concern, though I appreciate the recommendations. I'm just curious if anyone knows why they all look the same.

Ah, thank you! That makes a lot of sense. I'm broadly familiar with CDNs, so I figured they must all be using the same database, but I never made the step from that to "the sites themselves might have the same owners".

I had the same issue with NYT, but I managed to get in using archive.is! :)

That was it, yeah. Thank you.

Responding very late to say it's called MonsterQuest - sorry, I thought giving the name would violate the rules of this lemmy instance. (is that the right terminology?)