Would it be worthwhile to encourage posters to note when they are linking to the New York Times Online? They have moved to a 20 article views per month limit unless you subscribe. I don’t read the paper but I do follow Paul Krugman pretty closely and am annoyed when I am locked out of reading his work at the end of the month. The notification they provide is pretty sketchy so I never know how many of my freebies I’ve used and I always curse myself when I carelessly click a link that consumes one.
Okay, you had me worried for a second. I thought you were advocating giving people an Moderator Warning for linking to the NY Times.
But, yeah, I wouldn’t mind this, though I do remind people that on non-mobile devices, you can rest the mouse cursor (i.e. hover) over a link without clicking, and it will show you what site it links to.
If you’re not a paying subscriber to the online content at the New York Times it’s 10 articles a month, not 20.
I’m not sure about the policy but I got 20 views last month. Or at least when I received the first notification (or at least the first that I actually noticed) it was telling me I was on my 19th and only had one more. Sounds like there’s a glitch somewhere. And I realize I can hover and check the link before I click. I’m just not yet in the habit of doing so. I was thinking something along the lines of the tradition that developed in response to the awful loading experience of PDF files might be helpful. People still often note when linking to one.
They dropped it to 10 per month in April.
Good idea. What’s the best way to implement? A sticky? Peer pressure? Lead by example? All of the above?
I think example is the way to go - PDF warnings are pretty commonplace here, and this could work the same way.
Regarding this bit that TubaDiva quotes, “Yes. We encourage links from Facebook, Twitter, search engines, blogs and social media. When you visit NYTimes.com through a link from one of these channels, that article (or video, slide show, etc.) will count toward your monthly limit of 10 free articles, but you will still be able to view it even if you’ve already read your 10 free articles.” So does this message board count as social media, a search engine or a blog?
I’d also suggest not linking to a NYT article if you can get the important information or analysis elsewhere.
My reason for mentioning hovering is that, no matter what system we put in place, there are going to be people who screw up. Checking links before clicking them is just a generally good habit to get into. That’s all.
Though, now that I think about it, it would also be fairly easy to write a user script that would automatically add (NYT) after any link to that site.
var links = document.links;
for (var i = 0; i < links.length; ++i) {
if (links*.href.search('nytimes.com') != -1) {
links*.innerHTML += " (NYT)"
}
}
Here’s the simplest way. Just don’t format the links. Then everyone can SEE the beginning and end of url. This also applies to pdf’s.
If it doesn’t, a workaround could be that someone posts it on his/her Twitter account and then then posts the link to their Twitter post. Messy, but it’d work.
How do they enforce that? You can delete cookies (even flash cookies), use a different browser, a different computer, etc.
Even without deleting cookies, I could probably read 90 or more a month. I have 4 different browsers at work, 4 different browsers at home, and my phone. I’m ignoring the half dozen other computers I have access to at work since I’m unusual in that respect, but most of us have at least one at work and one at home.
If you delete cookies then there’s no limit.
I’ll try to set an example though I rarely link to the NYT. I’ve also tried to manage my cookies so that I don’t get any from NYT. Thanks for the suggestion davidm.
No guarantee that that will work. They may be doing something other than using simple cookies, but it’s worth a try.
On a slight tangent, I noticed that since I block all cookies, it doesn’t let me read any articles at all (any links from the main/topical pages to a specific article comes up 404).
One can quote the headline at nytimes.com and a copy/paste into Google News and that will pull up the article. (I suppose that there might be some nytimes.com features like Style that will not be found with Google News. I just don’t know.)
On iDevices, you can touch-and-hold on a link to see where it leads. A pop up window will show the URL and give you options to open, open in new window, or cancel. It’s technically an extra step since you have to then hit cancel, but totally worth it (for me, because I refuse to click on YouTube links from this board specifically; it will open the link, then launch the YouTube app and play. This would be fine, except when I go back to the browser, the bottom 3/4 of the window is then white and stays like that through scrolling. I have to exit Safari and then end the process, then reopen for this to be fixed).
And to get around the paywall, all you need to do is delete the end of the URL, starting from the first question mark. For example, if the link is this:
Simply delete everything from that question mark until the end, so it is then:
http://scientistatwork.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/24/from-marine-ecology-to-drug-discovery/
Boom, loads the same article. Also, not only is this legal, but Eileen Murphy (an NYT spokeswoman) said:
This is actually a good idea, since the vast majority of people either won’t want to bother doing this or wouldn’t know how to, but motivated/savvy users have some options.
That would be nice if I could copy a link off the board, paste it in the browser window, and have it show the link. Instead, I get the avilink hacked crap so I can’t tell squat about the link.