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Getting around website paywalls with devtools alone

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Re: Getting around website paywalls with devtools alone

#21

Post by creamyhorror »

retox wrote: 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.

Why would this work? I know FQDNs sometimes require specifying a period at the end, and browsers seem to accept it as well, but I wonder why this would affect some frameworks' displayed content. Normally a site would rely on a cookie to maintain logged-in status, and that shouldn't be affected by the request URL.

Re: Getting around website paywalls with devtools alone

#22

Post by bilekas »

retox wrote: 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 and none of them have fixed it after a year.

Guess it's a feature then and not a bug.

Re: Getting around website paywalls with devtools alone

#23

Post by bilekas »

neoromantique wrote: post #18
retox wrote: 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?

Can't speak for OP but I think I would be annoyed if I was paying a subscription and I found out I could get around it with a simple `.` because of developer incompetence.

Re: Getting around website paywalls with devtools alone

#24

Post by neoromantique »

bilekas wrote: post #23
neoromantique wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Can't speak for OP but I think I would be annoyed if I was paying a subscription and I found out I could get around it with a simple `.` because of developer incompetence.

If you are paying for a subscription then hopefully you do it to support the publication and find their work useful, and not because of a nag banner.

Re: Getting around website paywalls with devtools alone

#25

Post by manojlds »

bilekas wrote: post #23
neoromantique wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Can't speak for OP but I think I would be annoyed if I was paying a subscription and I found out I could get around it with a simple `.` because of developer incompetence.

Good that you spoke for yourself.

Re: Getting around website paywalls with devtools alone

#26

Post by bilekas »

neoromantique wrote: post #24
bilekas wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't speak for OP but I think I would be annoyed if I was paying a subscription and I found out I could get around it with a simple `.` because of developer incompetence.

If you are paying for a subscription then hopefully you do it to support the publication and find their work useful, and not because of a nag banner.

> to support the publication and find their work useful, and not because of a nag banner.

Unfortunately they kind of go hand in hand these days!

Re: Getting around website paywalls with devtools alone

#27

Post by maxboone »

vie00001 wrote: post #15
samwillis wrote: post #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.

> 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.

archive.ph also uses (donated) logins to archive (paywalled) content, however those accounts do get blocked from time to time.

https://blog.archive.today/post/678202832257794048/why-cant-...

While pretending to be GoogleBot used to get you full articles (or grabbing them from cache) this doesn't seem to be the case for some sites anymore.

They just give the first part of the article without the paywall, as that's usually enough for SEO purposes.

Re: Getting around website paywalls with devtools alone

#29

Post by felixthehat »

samwillis wrote: post #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.

https://12ft.io is another good one but yes agreed, you should cough up for the subscription when possible

Re: Getting around website paywalls with devtools alone

#30

Post by alkonaut »

10 years ago paywalled sites contained the content just hidden. Today I haven't seen a site in a long time that renders the content hidden (why would it do that? There is no reason to do it based on indexing/SEO as far as I'm aware).

Even cached/archived versions these days tend to not include the whole text. Basically: they figured out how to make a paywall, which frankly isn't that surprising.

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