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Comment by fridayoff | Hacker News Reader

Why are posts that require a sign in or subscription even allowed?

Why do people who complain about wsj on every thread even allowed? Click the "web" link.

Some of us are on mobile...

To add clarity to this statement, for some unfathomable reason, the "web" link does not show up on the mobile version of HN.

It certainly should, and does for me. If it doesn't for you, that sounds like a bug.

Great example why discussion of these meta topics is important.

I think if so many people complain about it then the link isn't very well known

I've been here for ages and it didn't occur to me to use the Web link to sneak past their sign up wall earlier today. I support no longer allowing submissions that require "one weird trick" just to read.

"Tell HN: Paywalls with workarounds are OK; paywall complaints are off topic"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989

That's lame. If I had seen that post that one day I would have chimed in. Good to know their stance though.

Added:

Send us update emails when you come to decisions like these. It would help keep me and others informed. I don't regularly re-read the guidelines and sometimes I miss threads like those.

The fact that the web link is on the comments page makes it pretty difficult to find. Took me quite a bit of wondering what people were talking about until I finally found it one day.

Moving the web link to page where the main link is would be an obvious solution.

It doesn't work for me on Chrome (which I usually use), but does on Safari (which I don't) I guess I have to clear my cookies or something?

I also support not submitting articles that require workarounds.

Flagging WSJ until they're shut out of HN will effect more change - they still gain SEO and popularity and social benefits from us using their contrived "trick" to leech off this community.

This isn't some kind of "contrived trick". The reason WSJ articles are available via Google search (which is what HN's "web" link does) is because Google won't index pages that can't be read by everyone clicking on a search engine result, and WSJ wants their articles to be searchable via Google.

Their contrived "hack" is left there so the internet will spread their paid content. They even experiment wth it.

http://digiday.com/publishers/wall-street-journal-paywall-go...

Thank you for this. I learned something new today!

Copy/paste the title into Google, and follow the link.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com