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Getting around website paywalls with devtools alone

bbarrows.com

11–20 of 123 posts

Re: Getting around website paywalls with devtools alone

#11
Many sites don't contains the full content even if you do that.

I'm not sure of how it works (does it subscribed to them all?) but https://archive.ph/ is a good way to see the content in those cases.

But really, if you are regularly reading content on a site you should subscribe to support the journalists employed there.

Re: Getting around website paywalls with devtools alone

#13
I use this JS bookmarklet to remove fixed elements and restore scrolling, it works most of the time:

https://pastebin.com/qBjJHkMv

I also have one to kill all running javascript and remove all event listeners, it works wonders when you are redirected to a paywall / login page after a few seconds.

Re: Getting around website paywalls with devtools alone

#15

Many sites don't contains the full content even if you do that. I'm not sure of how it works (does it subscribed to them all?) but https://archive.ph/ is a good way to see the content in those cases. But really, if you are regularly reading content on a site you should subscribe to support the journalists employed there.

> I'm not sure of how it works (does it subscribed to them all?) but https://archive.ph/ is a good way to see the content in those cases.

I think for search engine crawlers there are versions without a paywall so these articles can get fully indexed. Archive.ph, and similar services, might get the full content this way somehow. But I am just guessing.

Re: Getting around website paywalls with devtools alone

#17
A handful of sites will present the subscribers view of the page if you put a dot after the tld part of the url, i.e.

https://site.com./1235/article

Those behind Cloudflare don't seem to be vulnerable to this though.

I've emailed the sites I've found where this works and none of them have fixed it after a year.

Re: Getting around website paywalls with devtools alone

#18
post #17

A handful of sites will present the subscribers view of the page if you put a dot after the tld part of the url, i.e. https://site.com./1235/article Those behind Cloudflare don't seem to be vulnerable to this though. I've emailed the sites I've found where this works and none of them have fixed it after a year.

>I've emailed the sites I've found where this works

Why?

Re: Getting around website paywalls with devtools alone

#19

Many sites don't contains the full content even if you do that. I'm not sure of how it works (does it subscribed to them all?) but https://archive.ph/ is a good way to see the content in those cases. But really, if you are regularly reading content on a site you should subscribe to support the journalists employed there.

> I'm not sure of how it works (does it subscribed to them all?) but https://archive.ph/ is a good way to see the content in those cases. I think for search engine crawlers there are versions without a paywall so these articles can get fully indexed. Archive.ph, and similar services, might get the full content this way somehow. But I am just guessing.

you're spot on, this is exactly how sites like archive.org, archive.ph, or even if you click on "view cached version" on Google get the non-paywalled versions.

Re: Getting around website paywalls with devtools alone

#20
post #17

A handful of sites will present the subscribers view of the page if you put a dot after the tld part of the url, i.e. https://site.com./1235/article Those behind Cloudflare don't seem to be vulnerable to this though. I've emailed the sites I've found where this works and none of them have fixed it after a year.

Maybe some kind of common mistake when writing a pattern match
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