I received an email from a service that detects spelling errors, grammar errors, and broken links on websites. The company spams website owners to promote their services. Here is the content of the email:
With 340 posts and only 27 errors, I was pleased. Zero errors would still be better, so I clicked the link. The webpage shows a few errors for free, but a subscription is required to see the full report.
When I see blurred text on a website, I usually open the browser dev tools to check whether the effect is applied via the CSS blur filter (filter function). On this website, that is exactly what was happening:
So, you can simply uncheck both filter properties to remove the blur effect:
The text is now readable:
However, the subscribe button is still visible. A quick CSS rule can hide it:
I can now take advantage of the full report without paying.
#Conclusion
If you want users to pay for your service, use real protection. If the HTML already contains the content you want to gate, hiding it with CSS is not effective. Instead, replace the actual content with placeholder text so that removing the filter reveals nothing useful. You can also substitute the text with a pre-rendered blurry image.
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