Use a special phrase to mark paywalled articles on HN

No, we don't do it for PDFs and videos. HN itself adds those tags. Which don't count against the character limit. Your tag would.

I'm not terribly into the publication year in parentheses, but I have accepted that. Even though it's a real nuisance when submitting lots of "historical" stuff.

But I'm strongly against anything making submissions more cumbersome.

Can you find an archive link for the article you're looking for? Or altering your browser's User Agent String to Google's crawler will usually let you index the content.

There's no need for that. As soon as someone posts a paywalled article, someone will start a thread complaining about it.

Paywalled articles on HN are supposed to have a known workaround for the paywall.

not all of them do, especially now, when outline has problems.