John wrote:I don't like to screw around with Firefox too much, since I have
a lot of saved tabs and don't want to lose them.
However, I opened Chrome, and then opened an "incognito window." I
copied the above link into the chrome incognito window, and the entire
article was displayed.
What I was attempting to say in my PM, and apparantly did a poor job of, is that my testing indicates the subscription message from the WSJ is generated not by a characteristic of the article, but rather by a characteristic associated with a combination of the "individual and/or method" used to access the article.
Your testing appears to support the same thing my testing indicated.
The first time I accessed the WSJ article through an agregator's link I was NOT blocked. After I put the WSJ URL address shown while I was reading it in a post and attempted a second time it was again, NOT BLOCKED.
But if I clicked the same link in the same post I created several times, it started being consistently blocked.
However, if I broke the session, started a private browsing window in Firefox, then I could again access the article without being blocked ( when using the original agregators URL to the article ). This non-blocked access tould be repeated many time, on different logins, and was never blocked, even if I accessed it dozens of times, repeatedly, in a period of ten minutes, as long as I was using a private browsing session each time.
My only point in the PM was that the WSJ is not blocking access to this article, non-subscribers, soley because it is "Premium Content", but rather they appear to want non-subscribers to have access to the article under some circumstances ( such as they are infrequent visitors to the WSJ website and/or they link to the article through an aggregator and/or a search engine ). These conditions appear to be easily simulated if one uses a private browser and a URL that is not unique to a single user to access the article. If they can not identify you via a unique URL, a cookie, a web bug, or other means, they will not block you from thIS WSJ article.
Very few of the pay wall "big media" sites will actually block all non-subscribers from so-called premium content. They pick and choose, which non-subscribers they will block, based on the informaton available to them on who is requesting access.