User:LT/how to bypass paywalls

DISCLAIMER: THIS TRICK ONLY WORKS IF THE PAYWALL FUNCTIONS AS A POP-UP

Let's say you found a really interesting article from, say, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and are looking forward to reading it, only to click on it and find a paywall blocking access. You can learn here on a simple trick to bypass the paywall for free in the majority of circumstances.

Here's the process:

1. Open up https://archive.md/.
2. Enter the URL of the article you wish to read into the red box.
3. Wait for the process to complete.

And here's the explanation on why the trick works: when opening a news source with a paywall, the latter usually does not pop up (assuming it pops up and isn't immediately there when the page is opened) until very briefly after the moment you open the article. The emphasis here is that the pop-up shows after the exact moment the webpage is opened, because the manner in which archive.md archives webpages can be explained by either or both of the following two suppositions:

1. Pop-ups and certain features in an archived page don't function as they normally do in the actual webpage. For example, when archiving a tweet which contains a video, the video can't be played in the archived page.
2. When archive.md archives a webpage, it only inspects what it looks like when immediately opened, and not what it may look like several moments after opening it.

Now, not all paywalls can be bypassed, unfortunately. Only paywalls that act as pop-ups can be bypassed when using the archive.md trick. If you're trying to access an article from The New York Times from a century ago, the content you can see for free is restricted, and there is often a link saying "View Full Article In TimesMachine." When clicking on that link, the immediate page which shows up is a paywall, not one that acts as a pop-up appearing moments after opening the page. In many circumstances, there's no way to bypass this. However, sometimes you can modify the URL by changing the ".html" at the end to ".pdf" and successfully access the full version. This only appears to work for articles published prior to sometime in the 1920s though. Attempting the trick for articles published after a certain point in that time range simply results to going to the same immediate paywall with "?pdf_redirect=true&site=false" added to the URL.

In addition for NY Times articles prior to sometime in the 1920s, the TimesMachine trick won't work if a link to such isn't directly provided at the bottom of the page. This occurrence is less common, though can still be the case sometimes.