Webdesigners who waste their time
Tuesday, May 24, 2024
Web tricks to save you time
A few, very few, people calling themselves web developers, website designers, or a webadmin think they are clever by blocking the viewers ability to right click or copy text on a webpage. I used to be one of those for about a month back in 1995. Thought it was cool that I could block viewers from doing things. But as I worked on the site and needed to see what was taking place, I had to remove the locks or code that did not allow even me to copy or right click on a webpage. That got annoying really fast. I would forget to turn it back on when I uploaded the updated page, which made all the work i did to add the limitations a waste of time.
When I came across a website with similar limitations, I laughed. I knew how to bypass them or turn them off. “You cannot block me.” Which made me question why I had them. If I know how to do this and I learned it from someone else, than others know, albeit less than 1% of the people on the internet know, but still they know. Why am I wasting time trying to keep people out of seeing my code that do not know how to get in? And those that know how to get in, cannot be stopped.
Locks are for honest people. If someone truly wants to break into your home, car, business, or identity, locks are not going to stop them. Do you watch movies about heists, thieves, and break-ins? They are out there, and they are not just fantasy.
I removed the locks built with javascript and css and saved myself time turning them off and on when I needed to get in, as well as, not worrying about someone stealing my design styles and such. Who cares? It is not like it is proprietary or so unique they use it on theirs.
If you do not want something to be known or shared, do not put it on the internet
It amazes me that some website designers feel they have to lock their code or even the contents of their website in 2024. If you do not want something shared, stolen, copied, or seen, DO NOT PUT IT ON THE INTERNET. With the buzz about AI, I can see someone who put in the hard work and wrote the article by hand wants to keep their work without it getting chopped up or claimed by someone else saying they wrote it. But a simple css or javascript keeps the non-tech savvy frustrated until they search for how to remove it on the internet — which is how you probably arrived at this page.
But when there is a disclaimer that reads: the information contained on this website is provided for informational purposes only. All information is presented without any representation, guarantee or warranty regarding the accuracy, relevance, or completeness. Makes you wonder why they even bothered.
Digital Theft
I do not condone theft of any kind, but digital theft is hard to stop, mostly for the small business or self-employed who posts an article, data, or images that are theirs and they do not want anyone using them for anything else. Well, they have no way to follow, find, or track who took something and where it was placed on the internet. And if they do find the site displaying the copywriter material, what do they do then? Lawyer? Ask nicely to take it down? Like they have the time or money.
Big corporation do. They have a team searching keywords and such to see if someone is plagiarizing their content, or using their images illegally. Then they send that person a cease and desist email, or they send it to their hosting server and shut the site down. I am not saying it is okay to borrow from the small and fear the big, I am saying digital theft happens. How you deal with it after should have been thought about before.
Now for those that want to copy some text from an article or a portion of content from a website, for what ever use. If it is for an essay, hopefully you credit the website. Other things, I hope you can live with your conscience.
There are several reasons I copy text from sites. I want to quote it in an article — yes i give credit. As a web designer I do sites for the self-employed worker, small businesses, or organizations that do not have a marketing department or any idea what to write about themselves for the content of their site. So I borrow content from others that are similar, show them and we rewrite it to match their needs and their story. It helps them spark ideas. Mainly because most of the time the content I borrow does not relate to them and they want to change it.
These do not work
A Different Browser
You may have found some solutions to being able to copy text is to use a different browser. That does not work. Any browser with javascript or css capabilities, which is pretty much all of them, is going to render their lock the way they want.
Copy Through the Print Option
Print the page using the browsers print dialog. once the print dialog comes up, you should be able to highlight and copy the text, but you cannot.
Copy from source code
Most pages, if they have copy turned off, they have right click turned off as well. so you can either turn off javascript then use the inspect element in the right-click submenu, or Go to the computer’s menu for the browser. if you have developer tools turned on, select developer tools. [read the one below]
This only works
Disable Javascript
Disabling Javascript from the browser. Once disabled, go into the developer tools and search for user, or user-select. Once found undo the check box and now you can copy the text from the webpage. You need to do that for each page you open as a load or reloading of the page resets the dom back to its original locked state.