[thelist] Preventing right-clicking on a page?

.jeff jeff at members.evolt.org
Mon Oct 14 12:55:00 CDT 2002


benjamin,

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> From: Benjamin
>
> While nothing really works 100% (as has been beaten like
> a dead horse named Dog Food here before) you can make
> things difficult.
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difficult -- that's precisely it.  however, there's a valid point usually missed by the proponents of right-click scripts.  if you're trying to make it difficult for the 1% of your visitors that'll steal images, then you're unnecessarily making the use of your site difficult for the other 99% of your users as well.  just because the context menu can be used to view the source and save images doesn't mean it doesn't have other useful functionality attached to it that your users might be accustomed to using when surfing.

here's a couple of examples to illustrate my point.

suppose you're connecting to the internet from a country where local call usage is metered.  you'd want pages to load as fast as possible, right?  probably the first thing you'd do is turn off images and then only load those images you're interested in seeing.  if i put a no-right-click script on the images on my page, how are you going to be able to right-click the image you wanna see and select the "show/load image" option?  you can't.  if this is some sort of e-commerce site that's almost a guaranteed lost sale.  and you weren't even trying to steal the image.

my girlfriend is an above average computer user and has a certain way she likes to surf sites.  she'll go along clicking links until she finds that she wants to go back to a previous page and click a different link.  rather than clicking the back button in her browser or the backspace key on her keyboard, she simply right-clicks somewhere in the page and selects the "back..." option from the context menu.  the content on the site she's viewing has to be *really* interesting to her or she'll just leave the site and never come back if right-clicking is disabled.

just something to think about,

.jeff

http://evolt.org/
jeff at members.evolt.org
http://members.evolt.org/jeff/






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