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Just a note

That javascript and Telegraph thing works. Ta.

Bit weird that it’s so porous though. Presumably this is market segmentation, the price is lower for the technically astute?

15 thoughts on “Just a note”

  1. How crap is that ? Does anyone else get the impression that we are travelling backwards ?

    for Firefox users open a new tab and type about:config

    scroll down or search for javascript.enabled, the toggle switch is at the far right. Keep the tab open so you can switch it back on for other sites that need it after reading your fill of Bolshevik propaganda.

  2. I’d imagine it’s a matter of cost. Erecting a simple paywall’s just a bolt-on affects landing on the site. Rebuilding the site to circumvent workarounds totally would cost more money than the subscriptions lost. Vast majority of people have zero tech capability. Most of the people I know don’t seem to realise there’s such a thing as a browser. They think everything happens on Google. That’s how the access websites. From Google Search.

  3. Just a note on that free trade thing… is it OK to just take what’s been offered for sale?

    Simple question of character, no?

  4. is it OK to just take what’s been offered for sale?

    Did you never pick up and read a discarded paper on the train?

  5. BiS

    That’s very true about Google search. A friend needed a mail ID, so I added her to my company’s. She would access it by typing the exact URL, which was written along with userid and password on a post-it on her screen, into google.

    I bought my old mum a tablet and taught her to talk into it, when I go round there I have to delete literally hundreds of windows of google searches with her two word searches.

  6. BiS : “I’d imagine it’s a matter of cost. Erecting a simple paywall’s just a bolt-on affects landing on the site. Rebuilding the site to circumvent workarounds totally would cost more money than the subscriptions lost. ”

    There’s also that the internet is considered “free” by most people. So a paywall can have pretty drastic effects on views and clickthroughs, which in turn impacts ad revenue.

    Putting up a “soft wall” like the Telegraph lets peeps judge what that impact may be without massive refactoring of the code base ( or simply implementing code that’s already used on other sites within the same conglomerate…).
    If enough punters bite the bait, the paywall will suddenly become a lot less easy to dodge.

    Happens a lot lately in the arms race between tech-savvy users and manager-ridden sysadmins. 😉

  7. Brave browser has a built in provision to block per site, it is particularly useful for these sorts of paywalls

  8. @Tim

    Telegraph will fix if this info spreads

    Please delete this thread

    Readers please don’t spread this info

  9. “the price is lower for the technically astute”

    There is no free lunch here. The paywalls are made leaky on purpose. This so the technically astute end up quoting from their articles and thus drive traffic to their websites where the less astute end up buying subscriptions.

    This is why I don’t feel guilty when bypassing paywalls. I provide a service in exchange for a service. Why, just last week, I quoted something here from the New York Times about aggregate and distributional effects when thinking about economics. Here it is again:

    Still, though trade may be good for the country over all — after netting out winners and losers — the case for globalization based on the fact that it helps expand the economic pie by 3 percent becomes much weaker when it also changes the distribution of the slices by 50 percent, Mr. Autor argued. And that is especially true when the American political system has shown no interest in compensating those on the losing side.

    source: On Trade, Angry Voters Have a Point (New York Times)

    https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/16/business/economy/on-trade-angry-voters-have-a-point.html

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