Challenge for the internet savvy

[BarbaraK]

With the recent and recurring discussions of the original "pageant" puzzle, I thought it would be fun to go back and read all the comments on that page and watch how it unfolded.

Unfortunately, that's proving to be non-trivial, so I'm hoping someone here is a better internet sleuth than I am.

The puzzle's page on the WSJ site is apparently no longer on the WSJ site.

So I tried the Wayback Machine and found that it was archived! Yay. So I looked at the archived page, and trying to show the comments does not work for me, but looking at the raw html I can see 50(?) of them in there. (That's consistent with what I vaguely remember about how the comments worked - 50 would be initially loaded and there was a show more button to keep reading.)

Unfortunately, the 50 most recent are the least interesting - the ones posted after the reveal with people's laments. It's the early ones, with the transition from confidence to questioning, that really tell the story.

And that's the limit of my internet sleuthing ability. Does anyone else know any way to go back and get the other comments?

[Abide]

I got into a lot of the old posts here

But I don’t know exactly how. Possibly those pages are closed now so I’m glad I saved some of that history.

[rjy]

@BarbaraK: Just stumbled into this... are you a WSJ subscriber? I'm not, but that link shows the page does still exist, behind a paywall tho. Not sure what a subscriber would see, if comments still are available.

But otherwise, I was only able to see the same 50 in the HTML, and the javascript is inscrutable. Was hoping for a way to change the number to get the complete set.

However - I did select the version saved on Dec 31, and that shows an earlier, different set of 50 comments (when there were only 184 total). May not be what you were looking for, but in total you now can get at least 100 instead of your original 50.

[BarbaraK]

I am a subscriber, and I can see the page on the WSJ site, but there’s almost nothing there. No comments.