Comment by dmix
8 hours ago
I use FF and I paid for NYTimes. I was logged in, yet NYTimes constantly flagged my browser with a persistent captcha I couldn't bypass for months (across 2 different machines). It thought I was a bot because of the privacy features. So I cancelled my subscription using my phone.
Is there a reason to force all these bot checks on logged in accounts that are paying you money other than insanity? Surely you could just have a max monthly bandwidth limit per account and just stop worrying about this?
The New York Times is like a microcosm of the publishing industry. They seem to spend the majority of their effort on protecting their intellectual property. I'd rather they use those resources to improve their reporting, particularly about technical topics, but alas.
We just down know from the outside how much revenue they would lose by redirecting that effort though.
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I don't think there is any value of [x] for the monthly bandwidth usage you could pick that malicious users cannot afford, but legitimate users could not hit.
That's what early warnings are for. It's an easy problem to solve... except by the NYT.
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They probably don’t want you paying once and using that subscription to scrape the website. Which is reasonable.
Again, they have your login cookie and are already tracking what you've seen. Just start captcha'ing after several dozen articles per day.
when I used to subscribe to the nyt, I had to block a few of their endpoints to kill the awful popups and etc. This, the further ads for paying subscribers, and a host of other issues led me to drop them as well though.
Ha - I thought you were gonna say you switched browsers.
I just found a way to bypass the paywall on a web browser when I want to read an article. Which I figured was a easier solution than emailing customer service over a technical matter (never fun).
Just use Bypass Paywalls Clean. Paying for a subscription is up to you.
I just open dev tools and look at the file in the network tab. You can read it the response sub-tab usually.