[bArray]

I know news sites making viewing a paid-for experience is relatively new, but it feels kind of wrong to bring closed source information onto HN. Regardless of quality, it's generally frowned upon.

This link could be replaced by the link below without sacrificing quality (it may actually be the original source too):

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-samsung-elec-smartphones-i...

[aembleton]

- Add refcontrol[1] for Firefox, or some alternative for Chrome.

- RefControl > Options > Add Site

- Enter site as www.wsj.com and Action as https://www.google.com

You can also use this trick for ft.com and probably a few other sites.

1. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/refcontrol/

[nacs]

Thanks for the tip!

Works for me on Chrome with "Referer Control" extension:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/referer-control/hn...

[bArray]

Okay, that's pretty neat! Thanks for that - hopefully it'll be around for a little while. Is it open to allow web crawlers?

[mattmanser]

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

Are paywalls ok?

It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.

In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic.

Also, the "web" link under the story auto-googles the story title, which circumvents most paywalls.

[bArray]

In general, thanks. Not sure how I feel about the default HN policy is not to complain about HN policy.

I wasn't even aware that FAQ existed (not looked for it). It explains a number of other questions I've had about it's workings/policy.

[mattmanser]

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

If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a common semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

For future reference ;)

[whamlastxmas]

HN is really bad about this and I don't know why. My guess is that a small number of people are actually submitting and for whatever reason this circle uses WSJ a lot.

[JBiserkov]

Whenever you encounter a pay wall add a "? " (questionmark space) in front of the the URL (I do this by F6 Home) press enter and click the first result.

[fastball]

Neat. So, uh, why does this work?

[JBiserkov]

Because newspapers have to show the content to GoogleBot so people can find it; and Google has a policy that they shouldn't show you something different, so the pay wall is missing on this side of the house.

[homero]

It Googles it

[danso]

It's not new for the WSJ. They were one of the first major news orgs to impose a paywall, and it's one of the few success stories in the news industry.

[bArray]

I know and in a general sense I agree with their decision to do it - it makes sense. I just don't think it's appropriate for HN. If you do pay to bypass a news wall, chances are you will only pay for one. If there's three hypothetical equal competitors, that'll limit the audience by a third.

[taspeotis]

Or just click the "web" link and read the article?

[bArray]

All I get is "To Read the Full Story, Subscribe or Sign In". That's it. No other options. Maybe I could get around it, but it's a lot more hassle for the average reader than it's worth.

[gfosco]

there's a "web" link at the top of this page, it google searches the title, which will get you what you want.

[david-given]

To be fair, it's completely unobvious. (I'd have never have found it if someone hadn't pointed it out to me a while back.)

Look in the menu of links just under the title, between 'past' and 'comments'.

[kuschku]

Only in some countries. For example, for me, I have to use a second workaround to actually get the article content.

[ars]

That doesn't work for me, or for a lot of other people as well.