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Comment by mantap | Hacker News Reader

Can we have a new rule on HN please that if you submit a paywalled or loginwalled article you have to post the full text in a comment? "Web" link not working.

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Wouldn't that constitute copyright infringiment?

I’m not sure, but posting a URL that doesn’t serve any useful content to a public news aggregator leads to a pretty terrible user experience. I don’t distinguish between different types of URLs that serve nothing but a solicitation for payment: to me, a pay walled news site is no different than any other spam site that appears to promise content but really just asks for money.

I would like to see news aggregators (and similar services, like search engines) enact policies explicitly banning such URLs, simply because it’s a terrible user experience.

Have you tried opening the "Web" link in an incognito or private browser window?

To be clear, it's not a cookie problem. The web link "works" in that I can see more of the article but it still cuts off partway through. I assumed that they are providing a partial article for Google to index.

Bypass Paywalls for Firefox works for me, not sure why it's not in the official Mozilla addon repository though, you may want to inspect the code before using it:

https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox/blob/m...

Edit: reading the code is interesting on it's own, to see what each of the sites need to work (set user agent to Googlebot, referer to coming from facebook, etc.)

It used to be, and was removed in a big purge of add-ons that help you infringe copyright.

Thankfully, Mozilla's open model means anyone can still install it, their security model means the extension can only access a fixed list of sites it bypassess paywals on, and Mozilla's security UI communicates effectively when you click install on Github that this extension hasn't been reviewed but is limited in what it can do.

Thanks for the Information, apparently it was discussed a year ago already, had missed that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18567578

Me too :)

In that thread they talk not being able to install unsigned extensions in stock latest Firefox. That hasn't been the case for me. It might be because I'm on Linux, but I'm pretty sure that policy changed.

Overall, I have a lot of sympathy for Mozilla deciding not to spend their resources defending defeating paywalls.

Unfortunately, it seems this is an issue that won’t be fixed. Despite it being an issue for many users, talking about it typically just leads to downvotes even if the comment is productive in that it proposes solutions. It would be simple to fix either by allowing users to blacklist paywalled urls or creating an auto-outline bot or something but for whatever reason it doesn’t seem to be worthy of addressing despite the fact that invariably there are people that have issues with it as evidenced by comments like this one in pretty much every paywalled submission.

It’s a shame, really, because it likely prevents a lot of good discussion that would take place if everyone could read the linked content.

I flag all articles that are paywalled, maybe you should too.

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