How to Disable Scroll-Locking Hard Sell Web Popups
Often you land on websites that force you to make some action before viewing the page content. This is called a “hard sell”. Here’s how to quickly disable most hard sells.
Caveats
- This only works for pages that still show the page content. This wouldn’t work on a subscription paywall, for example The New York Times. Those sites never send you the whole article until you’ve subscribed.
- You have to do this every time you refresh the page. There are ways to make this more permanent with Adblock/uBlock and scripts, but that’s for another blog post.
Delete the HTML popup
- Use the browser tools inspector (Ctrl+Shift+C or Cmd+Alt+C) to find the popup element by clicking anywhere on the page.
2. This will highlight an HTML element.
3. Now press “Delete” on your keyboard to delete that HTML element.
4. Sometimes that may be enough, but often that will only delete an element inside the popup rather than the whole popup. You’ll know this if you still see a popup or you can’t interact with the page. To fix that, press delete again to delete the parent element.
5. Repeat step 4 until you can interact with the page. (If you hover links and buttons, does you mouse change?) If you delete too many elements, you can always use Ctrl+Z or Cmd+Z to undo your deletes.
Fix Scrolling
You can now interact with the page, but you can’t scroll. This is because the page height was set to the height of the screen with everything below “hidden”. You can double-check this is the case by looking for the right-side scrollbar. If the scrollbar should be there, but it’s missing, then the page height is being cutoff.
- Go back to the browser dev tools and make sure the “Inspector” tab is open.
2. At the very top, click on the <body> tag.
3. At the top of the right sidebar look for a “height” or a “max-height” property, and an “overflow” property.
3. Disable both of these properties by clicking on the checkboxes to the left of the properties.
4. You should now see the scrollbar on the right side of the webpage. If you cannot find these properties, try clicking on the <HTML> element.
IF you can scroll up and down the page, you are done! Have a nice day.
IF you still cannot scroll, then it means the website is purposely trying to make this hard to circumvent. Keep reading to find how to fix that too.
Fix Scrolling — Extended
If you see the scrollbar, but cannot scroll, it means the web developer purposefully disabled scrolling on the page. All they did was write code to “go to the top of the page” when you try to scroll. Luckily, this can be easily disabled.
- In the browser dev tools, click on the “Console” tab.
2. You’ll want to disable all “on scroll” events by pasting the code below into the input field at the bottom of that tab. Hit Enter to run the code.
document.body.onscroll = null;(If you’re justly worried about running arbitrary code, this code came from here)
3. You should now be able to scroll again. If that does not work you can try one of the different iterations below. If nothing works, add a comment with a link to a page where this doesn’t work. I’ll try to update this guide accordingly.
document.body.onwheel = null;document.onscroll = null;document.onwheel = null;
