It would be crossing a line for us to ban or penalize sites in response to complaints about the back button.

In this particular instance, it works fine for me on Chrome. When I test it in Safari, I can see the same behaviour that people are complaining about, but I also find that if you double-click the back button, it takes you back to HN.

I point that out because it seems clear to me that the site author has not set out to implement a “dark pattern” to trick visitors into staying on their site against their will; they've just tried to implement some in-page navigation, and perhaps only tested it in Chrome.

That's outside the boundary of reasonable grounds for us to penalize a page or site. It puts us in the position of having to investigate a page's behaviour in different browsers and to adjudicate on the severity of the dysfunctional browser behaviour and the author's intent (i.e., their inner thoughts). We clearly can't be getting into that; it takes up too much time and we will never be able to consistently reach fair decisions.

I can understand the frustration, but as well as asking HN users not to fixate on offtopic distractions like this, we also ask people to "assume good faith", and I see no reason not to follow that guideline in this case.

A quick email to the author would have more likely led to a favourable outcome than this meta-subthread.

Honestly, I feel like browsers should handle this.

Sites are always going to do malicious shit. The browser should know that when I hit the back button I want to go to the place I clicked that brought me here. SPAs have severely perverted this simple idea, but I’m sure browser devs can figure it out.

Some websites like PC Gamer have some shitty middleware (that seems to be very careful to hide its identity, only appear once per session, and not immediately register on page load, probably to try to delay browsers banning the ever loving fuck out of their practices) that uses pushState to hijack the back button to try to SPAM more articles at you, probably in hopes of grabbing your attention. I would be in favor of permanently banning domains that do this even once (intentionally and not just getting hacked) from ever executing JavaScript ever again and forcing them to switch domains and lose their SEO.

Somehow some sites are able to get around the video autoplay, I especially notice it on news sites.

going forward also doesn't work (displays an about; page) so I am wondering if the website is using React or some other framework and the routing library is setup incorrectly, causing this.