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Comment by ohwp | Hacker News Reader

Same with vBulletin™ boards.

Change

  showthread.php?1234-title

  printhread.php?t=1234

and suddenly you can read all the content (except for attachments) without login.

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Nice! Thanks for the tipoff.

Another good one is simply to load the google cache. Often these sites want to turn up in search results, so they allow the googlebot to see the content, and then show the user a paywall. Obviously this means the full content ends up in the cache. This works for the Financial Times, and probably many other such places.

I wonder why Google doesn't do anything about it. It seems these big companies/brands get to get away with anything.

Google claim to detect when people do that, but I guess it's not foolproof.

It's why experts-exchange has all the content all the way at the bottom now if you scroll half a mile down. They used to show users and google different results until Google cracked down.

It's really scummy that I land on these pages to be presented with a login box and need to do this trick to see the contents.

Tried it on:

http://forums.offtopic.com/printhread.php?t=5190971

And got redirected to the homepage instead.

Looks like they totally closed the forum. There aren't any posts indexed by Google.

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