If you receive a gift article from a New York Times Subscriber, you may need to create a New York Times account to read the article. Gift articles do not count towards the limited number of articles available to non-Subscribers.
This registration thing is new; archived copies of that page just say:
If you receive a gift article from a New York Times subscriber, you do not need to register or subscribe to The New York Times to read the article.
If you do get asked to register, it looks like this:
This seems to happen to about 1 in 10 US-based non-subscribers who try to use a gift link. I don’t know if the same registration-wall is being applied outside the US. The decision about whether to present a registration-wall appears to be based on a browser fingerprint, so if you encounter the registration dialog once, you always encounter it unless in private browsing mode.
There’s a half-decent chance that the threat of subscribers reducing their link sharing might induce the NYT to change their mind, so I encourage people to send a 150-200 word email to letters@nytimes.com asking them to go back to just letting gift link recipients access the article.
Workarounds include:
- Private browsing mode
- Reader mode
- Using archive sites such as archive.is
archive.is has problems you can check its Wikipedia article for. They’ve removed said code now but the fact that they even added it as recently as last month is covering.
Pinning this until I update the sidebar.
