Many sites don't contains the full content even if you do that.<p>I'm not sure of how it works (does it subscribed to them all?) but <a href="https://archive.ph/" rel="nofollow">https://archive.ph/</a> is a good way to see the content in those cases.<p>But really, if you are regularly reading content on a site you should subscribe to support the journalists employed there.
I just use Firefox's reader view. Does the same with just a click. If it doesn't work, just refresh in reader view and it should load properly.
Usually on these sites, there'll be an `overflow: hidden` element that's holding all the content. If you can find and disable that CSS line, it'll work as normal. Or just save it to the Wayback Machine and read it through that.
In the case of Washington Post it just has a "position: fixed" style on the <body> element. That's usually the case with most of these scroll locking sites, one of the root parent elements will have some CSS style that you can click off.
What I find annoying about paywalled sites is that they provide the full content to Google. And Google is OK with indexing the full content, even though it is not available on the internet, and even though they explicitly forbid the practice of showing different content to a search engine from what is available publicly.<p>Paywalled sites are just fine, but they are not part of the open Internet, and should not pretend to be.
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.<p><a href="https://site.com./1235/article" rel="nofollow">https://site.com./1235/article</a><p>Those behind Cloudflare don't seem to be vulnerable to this though.<p>I've emailed the sites I've found where this works and none of them have fixed it after a year.
I use this JS bookmarklet to remove fixed elements and restore scrolling, it works most of the time:<p><a href="https://pastebin.com/qBjJHkMv" rel="nofollow">https://pastebin.com/qBjJHkMv</a><p>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.
I recommend the browser extension "Bypass Paywalls Clean". I sometimes think about the morality of using it, but I just don't find it viable to pay all the websites where I read just a single article.
If you're unable to scroll the page, it generally means there is a "position: fixed" css rule on the body or a wrapper element. Turn off that css rule and you can scroll through the article normally.<p>Publishers are slowly wising up, though. Most don't load the full article for unpaid viewers anymore.
Yeah on the system most of the local papers use over here, the full content is not even loaded for non-subscribers. It used to be, so removing the blur div worked, but now only the headline, byline and lead text are visible :(<p>Guess they caught on to the "cheaters."
Just like with pointless loading spinners. You just delete the element which is overlaid on the complete content. Sometimes there is an overflow, opacity, or visibility attribute that needs changing. Fucking webdevs!
Title should be : "getting around very poorly implemented paywall (eg WaPo) with devtools alone".<p>As soon as your site sends the whole content of the article to the browser, you're not even trying seriously. (And Firefox "reading mode" is just much better ux than the devtools.)
<i>> But I didn't know how to scroll down on the page until today.</i><p>That is usually due to an "overflow: hidden" somewhere near the top of the DOM tree. Remove that and your normal scrollbar usually returns. You see this a lot with "accept being stalked to read this" pop-overs as well as paywall related shenanigans.<p>I've seen some sites put it back in via JS. There is probably a workaround for that too though the easiest one is to not worry about it and DNS blacklist the site so you don't waste time visiting it again in future.
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).<p>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.
Shortcut in macos, in most browsers, to get into "div selection mode" is "shift + command + c"...<p>Just press that, select the paywall (and any other junk backdrops/opaque divs), and press delete.<p>Sometimes the site also sets an `overflow: hidden` in the css, and you need to remove that to see the content..
Sometimes, however, you don't even get a full article text when the paywalled site loads. In those cases, no amount of Scroll Into View will help.<p>For those cases try something like Google Cache or Wayback Machine! It still won't always work, but it's nevertheless got a pretty good success rate.
The simplest method is just to refresh the page and hit Esc as quickly as you can to cancel the page load and prevent further scripts from running, that works for me 80% of the time. Sites need to be indexed by google so any paywall is often client side js.
This extension removes paywalls on many news sites (maintained, 33k stars) <a href="https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome">https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome</a>
Oh yeah, used this method to bypass a regional paywalled news site until they fixed it by sending out scrambled text that seems random enough to not be a cipher ("Zc xjixc Axiäclxiqcil jcqlxi ljx Zxcxqjxiqxi cc")
I just use <a href="https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome">https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome</a> and it works well for me.
It's insane that news sites with thousands or even millions of monthly users have paywalls like this. Sure it's great for anyone who wants to read for free, but some individuals make their livings now through paywalled articles. If the big guys can't protect from exploits, what about everyone else?<p>I created <a href="https://turbolink.io" rel="nofollow">https://turbolink.io</a> to attempt to solve this problem.
It seems the cat's out of the bag now. There's also another interesting way of getting around paywalls: a simple race condition. While loading the page hit stop as soon as you load enough of the content you're interested in <i>et voilà</i>. It <i>does not</i> work 100% of the time <i>and</i> I'm not using Chrome, however. ;)
Another option no one has menitoned is AMP. Many sites that try to use "paywalls" have AMP URLs which point to pages that have all the full text of the article in <p> tags. These AMP sites generally look great in a text-only browser that does not run Javascript. Popular example is WSJ. In the URL, add /amp before /article/.<p>Paywalls are insidious because they target non-subscribers. Why let non-subscribers view articles. Why not password protect all subscriber content. Paywalls are a way to make money from (the attention of) non-subscribers, targeting them with ads and tracking. The strategy is apparently to annoy people to the point of subscribing. Yet even if they subscribe they will still be subjected to advertising. One potential advantage is that a paying subscriber has an enforceable contract. In theory the contract could contain enforceable privacy protections. "Tech" companies would never agree to give people enforceable privacy protections; it would destroy their "business".<p>The way to save journalism, especially local news, is to regulate "Big Tech" middlemen, who generally do not employ journalists and produce zero content.1 The quality of journalism in general has taken a nosedive, but placing the blame for that on web users not purchasing subscriptions is conveniently ignoring the true culprit.<p>1. Arguably that's a prerequisite to maintaining their Section 230 protection. In the recent Supreme Court oral arguments, Google's counsel argued Google is not a publisher. Then minutes later she argued Google has to make design decisions "like any publisher", therefore Google gets a free pass to reorganise information in annoying and perhaps harmful ways to maximise ad services revenue, like inserting "popular" videos into YouTube search results that have nothing to do with the query string.
Some sites now are literally not loading the actual paywalled content until after you sign in, so not matter what you do you aren't going to be able to access it unless someone with a paid subscription shares that content and it is then uploaded to a third party paywall bypasser.