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Comment by Adutude | Hacker News Reader

It would be nice if hacker news did not accept links to pay-walled sites

You can also click on the "web" link at the top of this page just under the title of the article. That does a Google search for the article and that lets you in.

Wow how have I not known of this. Is it new? I've been here forever and never noticed that.

I think it's relatively recent. A few months old I think? No more than a year, I'm pretty sure.

Use this link instead, it bypasses the paywall: http://www.wsj.com/article_email/home-depot-u-s-credit-card-...

Where does the lMyQjAxMTA2NzEyNzAxNDc5Wj come from?

That’s for you to find out – I saw a link like this once, too, and built an extension for myself after discovering how and why it works – have fun ;)

Easier: Add /amp before /articles. (This has been posted on HN before.)

In fact, "amphtml" is the first link on the page. Follow this link to see the full article.

However the /amp URL does not retrieve comments like the URL you posted.

Mine is a very similar solution, but yes, this is another nice solution.

Personally, I prefer the amp version on mobile, and this on desktop.

Click on he "web" link at the top, under the article title. This kind of comment gets made every time these articles are posted. It's not that hard. Sometimes you gotta use an icognito window, but not always.

I agree, but I usually get around it by going the URL from Google and the referral from Google will work. I really have no idea why this doesn't get them de-listed from Google.

Because they aren't breaking any rules.

You're allowed to show different content based on referrers, just not if the user-agent is googlebot.

So which content are you supposed to show to googlebot?

The same content that you would show to other users.

Googlebot's referrer is google.com, so it is able to bypass the paywall, just like anyone else clicking off google.com

Right. So is the correct "fix" for this situation perhaps for googlebot to stop sending this referer?

Google wants to see what the site will look like to someone who clicks to it from google, because that's what their users will be doing.

I just use this chrome extension, which automatically lets me in:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bypass/ekfnpmbmfml...

They are easy to bypass for technically minded people, which should describe just about the entire audience of this site.

It'd be nice if we just let the voting system determine what people want.

Changing the user agent to mobile works for me as well.

Why?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com