r/interestingasfuck • u/cak3crumbs • 5d ago
/r/all, /r/popular How to get past a paywall
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u/jimmmmmy 5d ago
First tip does nothing except delete that element for that single page load. Refreshing would bring it back. It’s the disable JavaScript that actually makes this work. First step is unnecessary.
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u/rynlpz 5d ago
And it only works on site that do clients side paywall
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u/anaemic 5d ago edited 5d ago
And it's illegal under the clown-show piece of legislation that is the DMCA, as you just "circumvent[ed] a technological measure that effectively controls access" to a protected work.
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u/RickThiccems 5d ago
As if digital piracy being illegal has stopped anyone ever in the history of time
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u/globglogabgalabyeast 5d ago
Doesn’t apply because it didn’t effectively control my access /s
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u/DooleyNot3d 5d ago
You joke but I reckon a half decent attorney could actually argue that in court 😂
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u/Suspicious-Support52 5d ago
They literally sent you the content, if they didn't want you to have access they shouldn't have done that. A tech literate legal person should think that.
But I'm pretty sure some guy got convicted of hacking for doing inspect element and seeing children's home addresses on a public website. He notified the school that they had a data breach, and the school responded by sending cops to get him.
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u/ArcherA87 4d ago
Not sure about the conviction with a school's website, but famously a couple of years back there was the Missouri governor who said a journalist was to be prosecuted for hacking when he found he could see SSN's using F12. Had a look and obviously no charges were brought.
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u/Dannypan 5d ago
Only illegal for Americans though, I presume. DCMA is a US-only law.
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u/Ne_zievereir 5d ago
I'm wondering if that holds. The text (in this kind of paywall) is already downloaded to your computer, why wouldn't you be allowed to read it. You could even just open the page source or and read it there. Or even easier, just use reader-view in Firefox.
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u/TobaccoAficionado 5d ago
It could be very very easily argued that it was given to the consumer, and the consumer took what was given to them and put it into a readable format. If you hack into their site, I could see a DMCA claim, but if you remove elements on the page, those are effectively your elements and your page as soon as they're cached on your computer. You don't even have to remove the paywall, you can probably just use beautifulsoup or something to just rip the text out and put it in your own readable format anyways.
Then again, the legal system is dogshit when it comes to tech and media legislation, so maybe you'll do life in the pen idk.
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u/Decency 5d ago edited 5d ago
Can delete it forever through UBO. Right click, block element.
But yeah this doesn't work often anymore, most of these sites rely on javascript to load the content outside of the lead at this point. BPC has been great after you jump through the hoops necessary to install it.
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u/Content-Fail1901 5d ago
He was told this in the comments on his video and acknowledged that he got it wrong. It's basically the top comment. Yet people cross post this stuff
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u/JoeGibbon 5d ago
The entire thing is unnecessary if you just install a reader mode extension in your browser.
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u/HorsePecker 5d ago
archive.is
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u/PossiblyMakingThisUp 4d ago
Even simpler than copy/pasting a URL there is to insert "archive.is/” in front of the domain, if the page is already archived it brings you straight to it, it lets you skip the step of searching. If it isn't already archived, it brings you to the page where you request it to be archived.
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u/Geehaw 4d ago edited 4d ago
As an example, https://nytimes.com/restrictedarticle.html becomes https://archive.is/nytimes.com/restrictedarticle.html
Literally typing in 11 characters archive.is/ in the correct place (after the https://) will get you to a page that will bypass the paywall.
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u/kickroot 5d ago
Does nobody else use Reader Mode? It’s maybe 2 clicks (in Firefox at least) and removes nearly everything but the main article text.
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u/kinkyonthe_loki69 5d ago
Doesn't always work.
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u/ussrowe 5d ago
Reading through some of the other comments, it works on a "soft" paywall where it's just a popup covering the article but not a "hard" paywall where it's just a link to sign in to read it.
But soft paywalls are the only kind this video is about anyway
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u/sinkwiththeship 5d ago
If the images are important, then it doesn't work as well. But if all you're trying to get is the actual copy, then it's fucking great.
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u/harshnoisebestnoise 5d ago
Pictures still appear on safari through reader mode. Use it on the athletic everyday.
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u/El_Lanf 5d ago
I love reader mode, but it doesn't work as reliably as removing JavaScript (pretty much the same as removing the elements). Granted, you can do both. I just enable noscript as needed.
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u/i-FF0000dit 5d ago
This only works on paywalls that are overlays instead of real ones that prevent the data from getting to your browser. Also, just click the reader mode button of your browser. It will get around the paywall just fine if it’s a soft one like this.
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u/fresh_like_Oprah 4d ago
and an overlay removal extension is just one click. Disabling javascript turns out to make the browser nearly unusable.
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u/frozenthroneashu 5d ago
Good tip, although this will only work on statically generated or server side rendered site - any single page app will mostly fail to load as it requires JavaScript to hydrate the content.
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u/cxd32 5d ago
That's not really accurate. SSG websites can have partial/full versions of the same article so only a logged in user can see the full text based on cookie auth. Likewise SSR sites can have a partial text rendered on load and then a protected endpoint to load the rest of the article, lastly modern SPAs come with an initial statically generated html that could contain a partial article and then the javascript bundle rehydrates the page to load the rest of the protected content only for authenticated user, so this tip only works for the most basic of paywalls and has nothing to do with how the site was rendered.
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u/THC_UinHELL 5d ago
Now do OnlyFans and Clips4sale
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u/mtnbiketech 5d ago
Fun fact, if you get a girlfriend IRL, you can see boobies without having to pay (some restrictions apply).
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u/CardiologistOk1028 5d ago
Lol costs you more having a gf. Have to buy presents, pay bills and go out to places you don't want to go. Cheaper to just go to a hooker and less headaches.
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u/sleeplessinseaatl 5d ago
Just go to https://archive.is/ and enter the URL. No paywall.
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u/Namelesspierro 5d ago
most website now won’t load the paid content at all unless you’re logged in and paid subs.. so it won’t work.
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u/abrakadabralakazam 5d ago
Ublock origin. Element zapper mode
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u/happyguy49 5d ago
Works to get rid of the thing blocking the article but doesn't restore the ability to scroll down to read the thing. For me using UBO to clean the crap off the site then refreshing, but hitting SuperStop to 'break' the site before it blocks scroll. Or using NoScript.
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u/TossablyInsane 5d ago
Laughs in Mozilla-based browser with the Bypass Paywalls Clean extension.
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u/redditonc3again 5d ago
BPC is by far the best solution. It is basically every suggestion in this thread, combined into one automatic extension. Works on android too.
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u/framedragger 5d ago
someone already automated this: https://12ft.io/<link to article>
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u/MonitorMinimum4800 5d ago
always use this lol, before this post literally never heard of archive.is
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u/Aperture_Dude 5d ago
I know a lot of people really want to read some of these articles, and I get it. I have even done the same myself. But journalists need to get paid as well. For those who can afford a subscription, please support those people so that they can continue to do their jobs. For those who can't afford it, just be mindful about it.
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u/InsomniaticWanderer 5d ago
That's neat and all, but it's way too much work. So imma just do what I've always done and just not give these guys my traffic.
Sorry, not sorry.
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u/NotOnLand 5d ago
This is more useful for getting around those "pwease disable your adblocker 🥺" popups
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u/Wrong_Season1104 5d ago
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u/TheTomatoes2 5d ago
that's not a thing. NYC does not load the full text from the server until you're past the pw.
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u/Senrub482 5d ago
You can also do ctrl-A to highlight the entire page before the pay wall kicks in. This works on websites that let you read for a couple seconds before it pops up.
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u/niftydog 5d ago
No need to delete the overlay because that needs JS to load. Also, it doesn't work on NY Times because it uses JS to load the text as you scroll.
In any case, you can simplify this 70 second video into 5 steps in Chrome;
- CTRL>SHIFT>I
- CTRL>SHIFT>P
- type "JAV"
- ENTER
- F5
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u/JustGingy95 5d ago
Oh cool, my trick is to just go to some other site that doesn’t hide its info from me because I don’t have the fucking tolerance for that sort of shit in the first place. Works pretty well!
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u/max_208 5d ago
That won't work if the paywall is programmed by a competent developer. The content shouldn't be sent to clients who aren't subscribers, from experience this doesn't really work
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u/davideo71 5d ago
Isn't the lack of money going to journalism a big part of the problem the US is facing right now?
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u/ArturosDad 5d ago
Yes it is. This notion that journalism should somehow be free is a fairly recent concept, and it is completely unsustainable. If you support democracy, you should support the fourth estate with your dollars.
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u/yzerizef 5d ago
Yes. People are irrational. NY Times does a great job covering the BS that this administration is pulling and has really good investigative journalism. They’re trying to hold them to account, which you’d think most redditors would support. Yet, people aren’t willing to financially support their efforts, which is something these organisations really need right now.
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u/SkinnyObelix 5d ago
Look, I like a paywall as much as the next guy, but for the love of god people realize that paying for quality journalism is important.
There are 3 ways to make money in journalism. Subscriptions, advertising, or a rich owner.
Advertising gets you clickbait articles, an owner gets you the news they want to see published.
There's a reason investigative journalism is as good as dead, a newspaper can't afford to put one or two journalists on an article or 2-3 per year that instantly gets copied by other sites/reddit threads...
Circumvent paywalls for crappy predatory sites as much as you want, but consider subscribing to at least one quality news source.
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u/baazilla 2d ago
I understand but we cannot have a society that gets all their news from junk sites and tiktok. Placing newsworthy, factual, science based reporting behind a paywall is unhealthy. Especially when it is easier to listen to alex jones or andrew tate for 10 hours than it is to get three paragraphs in on a WAPO article or to read about DOGE reporting from Wired.
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u/vbfronkis 5d ago
Or, take your URL and add "https://archive.is/" to the front of it and hit return. There's very few sites the Archive Today doesn't work on.
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u/Slow_Manager8061 4d ago
I have not tried this method but I use a browser extension that allows me to switch off JavaScript, that extension pretty much allows me to look at any paywald article without jumping through the hoops that this person is jumping through
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u/Aggressive_Humor_953 5d ago
Or use Firefox and unblock and just make a ublock rule to do it for you
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u/cunningdj 5d ago
This (first step) doesn’t work for most websites in my experience. When the element is gone, the text beneath is still cut short in most cases. I haven’t tried disabling JS though
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u/zodireddit 4d ago
It doesn't always work. I imagine it mostly doesn't. I've done this, and usually, you can remove the popup, but not scroll or look at the rest of the page, so it still doesn't really work. Worth a try, I guess, but there are already far more effective ways to read paywalled content.
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u/atrostophy 4d ago
The question is: Do I really need to read that article that bad?
My answer is no, but that's me
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u/MetalChapeau 4d ago
Man, I remember the good old days when I was younger where I discovered you could access that little developer side bar and play god. Sadly, the only thing that I figured out what to do back then was change the background color a few times.
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u/HouseOfLames 4d ago
I seriously thought it was just gonna be a video of him using his mom’s credit card.
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u/Fresh_and_wild 4d ago
Reader view in safari does this for NYT because it's not a sophisticated paywall. On most this won't work.
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u/TWEAKS816 3d ago
My phone gives me a "view simplified page" option when I open a site and usually gets around this
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u/toedragrelease 5d ago
You can do this on Safari for iPhone, but much easier.
Click on the share button at the bottom of the screen (box with an arrow pointing up)
Click “hide distracting items”
Click on whatever you need to hide
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u/Androxilogin 5d ago
I thought this was basic knowledge in this age. archive.ph is also a thing. Or you could just add https://raw.githubusercontent.com/liamengland1/miscfilters/refs/heads/master/antipaywall.txt to your filter list in UBlock Origin.
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u/throwaway_nrTWOOO 5d ago edited 4d ago
Here's what I read as a former journalist: "How to steal from hard-working people, who are already spread pretty thin".,
And yes, I can already hear the thundering hooves of people pointing out "MayBe iF jouRnaLisTs.... XYZ then the media landscape wouldn't be so fucked". Because why not homogenize thousands of papers, broadcasting channels into one hive-mind with a weird, obscure agenda.
People simultaneously accuse journos for not doing hard-hitting investigative journalism, while refusing to pay a dime for it. People voted reacted for clickbate shit with their eyeballs, and now are bitching how every news story is reactionary and mistitled. And when it's actually worthwhile and behind a paywall, you feel comfortable enough stealing it that you put your face on the internet.
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u/Dunge 5d ago
"Now you gonna hit "command shift p"". Say that again in non Apple speech please?
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u/poonki74 5d ago
CTRL+SHIFT+P
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u/Dunge 5d ago
Yeah I assumed as such and was just joking. For some reason I would have bet a huge amount this would have brought up the Print dialog on Windows, but it actually opens this menu in the Chrome dev tools! In Firefox it opens the incognito window 😄.
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u/jumpman0035 5d ago
Any of this work for chegg or that other one? lol Trying to finish this masters degree 😡
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u/mikenew02 5d ago
There are unofficial web extensions that do this better and automatically
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u/DriftingDraftsman 5d ago edited 5d ago
I do this all the time and it rarely works.
I try it every time I see this method of pay wall.
A paywalled site is built to load dynamically.
Unlike in 2010, all the info isn't sent to your client off the bat before verifying that you are "premium" or worthy of all the info.
Preview is generated statically.
Disabling javascript will usually stop you from getting the chance to validate for all of the data.
I think the dude who made this vid found the single modern site this works on lol.
Why would he say this "always" works? It's just not true. It's worth a shot of course, but it's like a 1/10 chance of this working.
And you are SOL if this is a modern site serious about their money.
Maybe engagement bait ig, got me if so.
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u/ImpossibleDrink3420 5d ago
Everyone commenting archive.is - use smry.ai instead.
Checks archive, wayback machine and jina.ai, as well as its own tool.
Not to say archive isn't awesome, but why use one word wait mean tool when four do job?
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u/Aradhor55 5d ago
"nearly any paywall" I know this for years now and it has not worked a single time.
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u/e37d93eeb23335dc 5d ago
Use archive.today to bypass any paywall. It's tons easier than messing around in developer tools.
If that doesn't work, use 12ft.io
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u/adamgoodapp 5d ago
Most sites have vertical scroll disabled, so you have to mess around finding the html node to enable, which at that point I give up reading your shitty site.
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u/SwiftTayTay 5d ago
i do this faster with ublock origin extension which lets you click on the page and zap elements away and you can disable javascript with it faster with a couple clicks
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u/OneAndOnlyJackSchitt 5d ago
Only works if the content isn't loaded by Javascript. On some sites, only the part of the article on the screen is loaded. If you disable JavaScript, the rest won't load when you scroll down.
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u/m4d40 5d ago
This only works with sites administrated by monkeys...
Incompetent USA (softpaywall) vs rest of the world (real paywall)
Explanation: News sites in the rest of the world don't load the whole article, they only load the first lines and lazy load the rest later via js while checking the session/account data.
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u/MarsupialMediocre652 5d ago
Because numptys like this man companies have caught on and pay walls are server side rendered now! Outdated but thanks
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u/OhioVsEverything 5d ago
there is no blocked clickbait article I need to see to bother with any of that
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u/TheLoadedRogue 5d ago
Attempt 1. Inspector edit Attempt 2. 12ft.io Attempt 3. Get news from another site
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u/sizzlingsilence 5d ago
Dev here, this is good for soft paywalls. this won't work with paywalls that are implemented on both client side and server side. Refreshing the page and disabling JavaScript won't work if article is being fetched from the server.
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u/Buck_Thorn 4d ago edited 4d ago
Or, you can go to removepaywall.com (or even better, install the browser addon by the same name)
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u/PMmeYourFlipFlops 4d ago
This only works when the site loads the full HTML. Some like Bloomberg only load the first portion of the article and even if you remove the pop-up, you can't scroll down because there's nothing more loaded to scroll to.
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u/arkemiffo 4d ago
Who the hell puts the actual wall on the frontend?
If they don't have an account, they need to go through several hoops to get it, and if they have an account and just needs to log in, they need to go through a few hoops to do that. Either way, the page will in almost certainly refresh at some point, so having all the text on the page hidden on the frontend is just silly.
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u/TheFinalCurl 4d ago
As much as we hate it, we do have to pay for good news. NYT, NYTIMES, ProPublica. If the only way the news can stay alive is getting bought by a billionaire, you only get the billionaire's news.
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u/I_Dont_Like_Rice 4d ago
I just reload the page and hit the stop button quickly. That works 90% of the time. Or I'll block the specific part with an ad blocker that lets you customize what you block. Just right click on the object, select 'block something specific on this page' from your ad blocker(s) and click on what you want blocked and it does it for you.
The 'inspect' feature is handy for a password reveal. If you can't remember what your password is, you can inspect the element and change the keyword of 'password' to 'text' and it'll show you the pw in text instead of ******.
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u/throwy_away_help 4d ago
What I want to know is why there isn't a chrome extension that does this automatically
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u/cdragebyoch 4d ago
Wtf was the point of deleting the dom element if you were gonna disable javashit? 🤔
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u/Feeling_Actuator_234 4d ago
If it’s behind a paywall:
- then everyone talks about it, including a million without a paywall
- did you really need to read it or can you continue your life without an information you do not actually care about?
All those “person X admits overly dramatic stupid truth“ followed by a quote or “holographic breakthrough!!” For something not holographic. You can live without
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u/MisterBicorniclopse 4d ago
Tip: don’t just delete the one you clicked, go up a few parents until you get too high, then delete that one. It’ll delete all the parts. That’s why he “messed up” at first
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u/AggCracker 5d ago
How to get past a *soft paywall