Unblock Know Your Meme and look up where a meme came from

TrickyBird fetches the page from Know Your Meme and rewrites what comes back before it reaches you. Links, thumbnails, stylesheets and the requests the page will make later are pointed at our own address instead. A small script rides along in the tab and does the same for whatever loads as you scroll.

An entry here arrives assembled. The article, the origin and spread sections and the gallery beneath them come from the server as a finished page, which puts the weight on the pictures: they sit on a media host of the site’s own rather than on the address you typed. A proxy that carries the article and not the pictures hands you an entry about a meme with the meme missing. Through TrickyBird the images come by the same route as the text.

That holds for whatever the site fetches once you are moving through it: more of a gallery as you scroll, the thumbnails on a search page, one image macro opened at full size. Each of those goes back through our address instead of leaving on its own.

Read an entry, and look one up. This is a site people arrive at with a name already in their head, so the search box matters more here than the front page does. The front page comes in with its featured and newest entries in place, an entry opens with the gallery under it, and the search box returns results you can actually see, thumbnails and all. None of it needs an account.

Know Your Meme files some of its material under a prefix of its own, /sensitive/, and asks you to confirm before it shows you anything kept there. That gate is the site’s own, not ours. It is worth knowing about before you meet it on a network you do not control.

Signing in is the piece this page cannot speak for. Our checks have not gone near it, so it will not guess. Comments, submissions and anything else fastened to an account live behind that login. What did get tried is the reason most people arrive here, looking a meme up, and it came back working. If you came for the picture rather than the story behind it, Imgur and GIPHY have pages of their own.

Where this stops is easy to say. TrickyBird is for reaching a public site your network blocks, and for keeping your IP address away from that site. It is not a way into somebody else’s account, and not a route around a payment or a copyright.

What arrives at Know Your Meme is a request from TrickyBird, so your own IP address stays out of it. Your network sees a connection to TrickyBird, with the Know Your Meme address riding inside ours, encoded rather than spelled out.

On our side, the edge keeps a short access log to run the service and stop abuse: a shortened form of your IP address, the hostname of the site you connected to, and basic response details, kept for at most 48 hours. Which entries you read is not in it, and there is no account for any of it to attach to. Our privacy page has the full picture.