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Comment by Zak | Hacker News Reader

This article is paywalled.

I'm not sure what the appropriate response is to that on HN. I'd probably downvote if I could downvote submissions, but flagging seems unduly harsh.

I found a Chrome extension to bypass the paywall: https://github.com/njuljsong/wsjUnblock

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The full article is available on archive.org. https://web.archive.org/web/20171203140509/https://www.wsj.c...

The https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html says pay-walled articles are fine.

I wish HN took a stronger stance on this. It is extremely annoying to get around paywalls on mobile / tablet, where I do 90% of my reading, and you never know before you click.

HN does make the submission source visible, so you can check that before you click. If it's a source you're not familiar with, you might still hit a paywall unexpectedly, but wsj.com (and others, like the Washington Post) come up frequently enough that you generally know before you click through.

Just flag it as paywalled. So I don't hit a paywall "unexpectedly". I'd rather not bother clicking at all.

(Edit: I think I misread what you meant by 'flagging', since on HN that word means a user clicking a "flag" link to report that a submission is bad for HN.)

If you flag stories for that reason you'll eventually lose your flagging rights. HN's policy is: paywalls with workarounds are ok, users can supply workarounds in the threads, but complaints about paywalls and paywall policies are off topic.

The paywalls suck, of course, but banning NYT, WSJ, Economist, New Yorker, and all other such publications would suck worse. I realize not everyone agrees with this, but it seems the right call to me, which doesn't mean I like it any more than you do.

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

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

Lots more at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix=false&page=0&date... if anyone wants to read it.

Your parent may be recommending tagging such articles with [paywall] or some such as opposed to clicking “flag”. It certainly could be worded better. I’d rather not see titles further cluttered, personally. The source already effectively provides that, and additional context.

On a closer reading I think you're right. Edited above. Thanks!

Precisely. Label them with a paywall tag.

just prefix the URL with http://facebook.com/l.php?u=

Why does this work?

This simulates an outgoing link from an article shared on Facebook. Apparently, the WSJ has chosen not to paywall articles users get to from Facebook shares.

Spoofing the referer header to a google search also has this effect, and I think that's what the bypass extension I linked does.

It's also what the "web" link on hn lets you do. No crazy add-ons required.

The "web" link does a google search for the headline, which eventually leads to the same result in most cases.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bypasspaywall...

Bypassed the paywall for me on Firefox.

http://archive.is/2fVwQ

> This article is paywalled.

To quote https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14989998

> If you prepend "facebook.com/l.php?u=" to a wsj link, it will let you read the full article. Like so:

> http://facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.wsj.com/articles/how...

Submitter here: sorry for the paywall. (I didn't notice, because I have some extensions to bypass them.)

The correct way to get past a paywall is to pay. If you don't care enough, just move on. There is enough free stuff on the web.

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