Joins New York Times and BloombergQuint

Thanks to Modi’s slow Internet, I found yet another site taking forever to download. When the page finished downloading, the content of the article suddenly disappeared and paywall appeared. Now, Bloomberg is also confirmed to be using Javascript to protect its paywall.

A few months after I informed BloombergQuint, they implemented a real paywall with truncated content, instead of one protected by CSS. New York Times continues to be on Javascript security.

When you truncate content, search engines cannot find much value in the pages. These pages will not appear in the search results. CSS and Javascript paywalls continue to provide the content to search engines.

There is a simple alternative to all this. Like my website, use Javascript to lazy-load images, CSS, other Javascript files and content for sidebar, header and footer. Someone who disables Javascript will not see the images and miss out on formatting. Search engines will continue to index those pages.

Articles should be truncated and moved behind the paywall as they grow old. Their URLs should not be changed to retain whatever search engine mojo they have acquired. And, the meta tags for robots (in the HTML) should say “index,nofollow,nocache,noarchive”.

Update: I found that the New Yorker is also on Javascript security.

Instead of promoting social media sites and writing click-baity articles using millennials, how about hiring some experienced journalists and programmers.

One of the advantages of having the Modi government’s slow Internet is that web pages take forever to download. I clicked on a link and this NYT page started downloading quite lethargically. For some time, I was able to read the article but when the Javascript gunk finished downloading the article suddenly got truncated and a floating panel asked me to register to read the article. So, I turned off Javascript and the article loaded in full. No registration necessary.

They say that the site is still free if you sign up but I was not going to investigate. With BloombergQuint, I had to write a GreaseMonkey script.

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