Unit Structures Fred Stutzman’s thoughts about information, social networks and technology.

Fixing the Yahoo News Toggle

If you frequent Yahoo News, you’ve likely noticed the site has been redesigned.  Overall, the design is clean, information-rich, and provides a nice update to one of my favorite news sources.  Along with the redesign, Yahoo has introduced a bizarre, annoying functionality to news stories.  When a news story loads, you are delivered a truncated version of the story; to see the full story you are forced to click on the “Read Full Article” button that hovers midway in the page (generally next to an ad).  This has proven endlessly frustrating.

I figured this issue would be easy to fix.  Inspecting the code, the javascript controls are simple enough - the toggle is controlled by a simple onclick listener.  Disable the script and all should be well, right?  As it turns out, this is not as easy as it seems.  The script was inline - included in the page - meaning the only way to block it was to block all javascript in the page.  This makes Yahoo news fairly unusable.  After playing around with Adblock Plus, however, I discovered a formula that works:

news.yahoo.com#*(class=ult-section mod read-more-toggle)

This filter will prevent toggling, displaying the full page when it loads.  There are some side effects, the primary one being the story content loads last.  I was willing to trade this off to not have to click each time I wanted to read the rest of the story.  It appears that recently Firefox introduced functionality that enables just-in-time inspection and modification of pages.  Perhaps when Adblock Plus is updated there will be a more elegant solution to the inline javascript issue.

thanks for the tip, having to click for the full story was really annoying. I hope someone writes a greasemonkey script or yahoo comes to its senses and stops making us do this!

Yeah, it is especially annoying on an iphone. It takes forever to load. I don’t know what Yahoo was thinking, it really ruins a nice redesign.

I believe yahoo butchered the news site. The font is 6 points too big, there are far too many gaps between the stories making them difficult to read.. and yes, the read full article button..

Looks like Yahoo has changed the Javascript, so this will no longer work. I’ll see if I can fix it.