How to work around "You have read your free articles" messages

[andrewducker]

I'm aware that more and more sites are offering "Read the first three articles this month for free, pay us to read more!", which gets in the way of reading some of the links I share.

The problem being that I'm damned if I'm paying £10/month to about 30 different sites because I read widely. If I _only_ read two sites for most of my news then it'd be worth it, but until the news sites get together and say "You can have access to all of us for £30/month and we'll split the cash depending on your reading habits" they're not getting my cash*.

In the mean time, these sites tell the number of articles you've read by storing a cookie in your browser. The best way around this is to open a private window, which doesn't allow the site to see your regular cookies (and other tracking information), and so it thinks you're there for the first time.

If you're using Firefox or Chrome there are addons which will allow you to open the current page in private, which you can then use whenever you hit a warning.


*I do pay for Ars Technica, and I'd pay for a digital Wired subscription if their sign-up page didn't constantly tell me that my address didn't exist. And that I have to phone America to sort that...
**That's what Firefox calls them - in Chrome it's "incognito", in Internet Explorer it's "InPrivate". Guide to opening a window in this mode here.

Comments

[strange_complex]

Thanks for this - it sounds obvious now you say it, as I already knew it was based on recognising cookies, but I hadn't thought of this very simple solution (though I've sometimes got round it by opening an article on my phone when my computer has 'used up' its free views for the month). My main irritation with this system is that quite often I just want to glance at an article and get a sense of what it's about, but other times I want to sit down and read something fully. I don't want to have to try to remember how many articles I might have viewed at multiple different sites which now use this system in order not to accidentally 'use up' what could have been a proper read of an article by glancing at something earlier in the month on the same site.

[cmcmck]

They never learn do they?

It's like the idiots who say: 'We notice you have an adblocker running'.

Yes, precisely! Well spotted.

[calimac]

I don't mind the ones with an "N per month" limit so much as I do the ones that don't say what the time period is, or even those as much as the ones like the Wall Street Journal which don't allow you to read anything at all, except the opening paragraphs, without subscribing. Your workaround won't work for those. If they'd offer a micropayment option for individual articles, it wouldn't be so bad.

Then there are those which I would wish to subscribe to but which you can't get just the online edition, you have to subscribe to the physical magazine as well. This is worst when it's an out of town newspaper.

[havocthecat]

AHA. THAT EXPLAINS EVERYTHING. I thought it would be IP-based. Thank you.

[lilysea]

Thank you! ^_^

[bohemiancoast]

Incognito windows don't work on all paywalls. Some however, (*cough* FT *cough*), won't let you access a page directly, but if you google the headline of the story and then click through, you'll be able to read it...

You can help this whole process by using your limited funds to support journals that have the entire publication online unpaywalled.

[marahmarie]

Another suggestion: you can blow through the paywall on some sites with a disable JS extension (like the one I use in Firefox). On some sites it won't load comments nor fully load pictures but still lets you read the article(s) you came for.

[andrewducker]

Also, Firefox had a reading mode which can override those popups sometimes.

[marahmarie]

Huh, I'll have to try that! And it still has (in Dev Edition, anyhow; haven't checked latest official).

I don't know if it's just me but WSJ has been letting me read lately, without any workarounds on my part. I've been meaning to see if they finally are letting the public read at least some articles for free, or what.

[jesse_the_k]

Helpful info, thanks.

FYI, there's another passion-project browser called Brave

https://github.com/brave

that defaults to private-browser mode. I've used it on MacOS & iOS and it works fine. It's based on Chromium but only supports a limited range of extensions.

Their "Brave Payments" claim to be the distributed fiscal support system you envision.

[conuly]

You can also try switching browsers or simply... deleting cookies.

[po8crg]

There are some where you have to create an account to see anything and then they restrict the number of articles unless you pay - e.g. the Telegraph, I think - but you can usually create one account per email address, and most people have quite a lot of email addresses.