Looks like Yahoo lets you toggle this off yourself, with a cookie. From Yahoo’s own help page: At the bottom of the page is an option to turn OFF expand/collapse. If you turn this off, you will not see the “Read Full Article” button anymore and will see only single, open pages.
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/news/expandpage.html
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.
Fred Stutzman is a doctoral student, researcher and teaching fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science. He studies how people use social media.
