We’ve all seen them before – those pages that are like “OMG WTF SOMETHING HAPPENED” (or “OMG WTF THIS CELEBRITY SUCKS”). You want to see wtf it’s on about, but when you try, you need to like the page first (thus raising the e-peen of whoever made the page), complete over nine thousand surveys, sacrifice a dead goat, and beat a cheerleader to death with her own mini-skirt before you can even see what it’s about.
I will only like things I agree with on Facebook, I’m not completing a single damn survey, there aren’t any goats, alive or dead, around here, and the cheerleaders around here are actually pretty nice.
So let’s work around every restriction, shall we? The extensions I link to are for Google Chrome, but I’m sure they have Firefox equivalents.
1: Be a snark about it!
The first step in combatting these pages is to give a bad attitude towards them. For that, I use the fbosf extension (Facebook on s’en fout, where “on s’en fout” means “We don’t care” in French). It’s basically the “I DON’T CARE” button. It will fill your comment box with an automatic “I DON’T CARE! (link to fbosf)” as well, and I do send that out to further have an impact.
Works pretty good too.
Bieber's Cell? Whoop de crap.
2: Fear No <div> Hiding!
I’ve gotten used to being able to use the Chrome extension fbpageshow to just click a button and show whatever hidden content the page wants me to not be able to see until I click “Like”.
But if that fails, Chrome also has a way to edit page properties temporarily. Change the color of a button, or (in this case) set a <div> tag to not be invisible. Easy. It’s more complicated, but it works.
3: SURVEY EL BANISHO
I got information from a site owned by a dmmcintyre3 about how to get around CPALead/CPALock, which handle the surveys. It basically boils down to this: Open C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts with a reasonable plain-text editor (such as GVIM or Notepad++ – Windows Notepad is probably NOT going to work) and paste this at the end:
98.142.209.5 cpalead.com
98.142.209.5 cpalock.com
98.142.209.5 www.cpalead.com
98.142.209.5 www.cpalock.com
98.142.209.5 adscendmedia.com
98.142.209.5 www.adscendmedia.com
(Note: The site I got this from says you can put all the .coms on one line with the one IP, but I’m skeptical, knowing MicroShaft)
You’ll know it’s doing it’s work when you see a bar (similar to the Internet Explorer Information Bar) saying “CPALead or CPALock was here but it has been blocked.” It even lets you scroll down!
And viola, you can see whatever damn content the page is about, nearly hassle-free! You’re welcome.