The core problem is the newspapers wanting their cake and eat it. They want those sweet google hits but they don't want to give their articles to readers without payment. So there's always a way around it if you can manage to fake a google spider.

For me the current model is so broken. I end up on lots of different newspaper sites. But no, I'm not going to sign up for a subscription to the washington post or whatever to view 1 or 2 articles per month. That's just ridiculous, I don't even live in America. I subscribe to the local paper because it has content I read every day.

If I'd subscribe for every article I get referred to by google or here on HN I would spend hundreds in monthly subscriptions :P It's just not a reasonable ask.

It's ... kinda crazy when I type it out.

But that's basically what advertisements do for publishers today, and if we're moving away from that model (and we *really* should), what do we replace it with?

If your business model doesn't let you offer that, then the answer is to accept you're not gonna be able to rank in search engines. That's it. Maybe a search engine for paid content could exist as its own thing, but that would be because people using it would expect they'd have to pay for what they want to read there.

The attempts to get both Google hits and paywall content feel like some author trying to make everyone pay them money to borrow their book from a library; completely counter to the point of the institution to begin with.

. . . and now that I've done all that the repository is 404ing.

(A long time ago, I clearly remember it did. There's nothing about browsing files or participating in the effective forum that's called "Issues" which fundamentally requires JS.)

    Over-engineering indeed, but it does address actual problems.
    Primarily: Addressing what most browsers haven't well managed to handle: interaction with big files.
    E.g. huge database-like Plain Text: browsers typically fail with OOM (Out of Memory).

    I'll write a review of GitHub's delivery infrastructure when I have the time.

    Abuse of animation and skip of best-effort loading:
    This is probably more relevant to the sluggishness and bad interoperability, rather than JavaScript.
    [ Those abusing JavaScript for nefarious purposes: probably not the JavaScript to blame. ]

    Standards established don't necessarily imply being well-designed:
    Blindly following without thinking shall regardless trap.

    Many current infrastructures are fundamentally flawed and difficult to fix:
    1 step wrong, all steps wrong.

    Depends.
    Certain functionality may not be achievable without alike capable interfaces (not necessarily JavaScript).

    "slow or very challenging to implement in pure HTML/CSS"
    Erroneous: May be outright inaccomplishable.
    Relevant research: https://github.com/MasterInQuestion/Markup

That's the heart of it, isn't it? It's challenging.

At the core of modern web development is the attitude that developer convenience trumps all.

The software is free after all. (The thousands you pay in bandwidth and hardware upgrade costs to keep running their bloatware doesn't count because none of that goes to the web developer, and is therefore irrelevant in their it's-all-about-me worldview.)

Coupled with the Archive.ph button they make up my holy trinity of paywall bypass.

If not, how could it be classed as copy-protection?

Edit: One other thing: if spoofing UA headers was a problem, all the browsers in the world would fall foul of it - because non-Mozilla browsers all say that they're Mozilla, and Opera said it was IE, and Chrome said it was Safari, and now a bunch of browsers say they're Chrome - at the same time as saying they're Mozilla. Except it's more complicated than that.

When big corpos tell you to jump you jump.

Hard to see how to police that from the web site's perspective though.

To be clear I'm not advocating for anything here.

If this project were, say, an adtech company, or someone publishing open source solely for resume-boosting reasons, then principles might not matter.

2) Putting something on Gitlab means that there is one level of activation energy between idiots trying to pad out some corporate "social goodwill" number by "fixing" things on your project.

If I ever had to open-source anything, I would host it somewhere else and mirror a read-only repo to github.

Edit: or, maybe it does. I see WSJ.com in the config, with a referrer as drugereport and user agent as Google not to get around it.

I also point out there is "bypass paywalls" and "bypass paywalls clean", kind of similar to the uBlock family with "uBlock origin" being the "good guy" edition

If there is no mirror on archive today, the extension cannot insert it.

Can this plugin work on it? I doubt.

This is a help in particular for mobile firefox because they refuse to let us sideload addons.

EDIT: Actually, never mind, this isn't even that, this is a fake according to the reviews.

We really need sideloading capability in mobile firefox :(

Settings> about Firefox> tap on the fox logo a few times> debug menu enabled> now you see "install ad on from file" under advanced in the settings menu.

I don't know whether this also works in the standard version of Firefox for Android.

It is good they reenabled this feature. Since it is/was very short-sighted of Mozilla to make their centralized addon store the single gatekeeper for extension access on user devices. As if they never thought about power dynamics in software.