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Toan Le Viet
Toan Le Viet

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Medium.com used local storage to check limited access ?

When you read a post on medium.com you may be reach to limited access and a popup required an upgrade plan appeared

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But when I open that post in incognito windows or clear local storage of browser then I login again, I can access that post easily.
I think medium.com should save reading count in database and handle response from server.
What do you think about this problem ?

Top comments (2)

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ahferroin7 profile image
Austin S. Hemmelgarn

Even if they store it in the database, they have to correlate with some unique user identifier, which by definition has to be stored client-side. It's just not possible to reliably uniquely identify a client any other way. Given that it's also not possible to reliably identify that someone cleared local storage or is using incognito mode, there's not really an way to work around people bypassing limits like this.

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toanleviet95 profile image
Toan Le Viet

Yup, I think that's too hard to prevent people bypassing limits :D