Disabling Right-Click?

Abe Olandres Editor-in-chief May 15, 2006 · 1 min read

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Ajay left a message in my IM two days ago asking how to disable right-click on her blog. I replied that it wasn’t a solution to the problem. Could be a deterrent but at the end of the day it’s still easy to copy your content and pictures.

To me, disabling right-click could be doing more harm than good to your blog:

Prevents “Open link in new tab” for Firefox/Flock users like me. And I use that a lot.
Highlight and search. If you’re not familiar with this in Firefox/Flock, you can highlight a word or a term, right-click and a “Search this in… Google” option will appear.
Quoting your blog entry. While Ctrl+C is the common copy command, most people I know still use the Right-Click technique.

So what’s a good alternative? Watermarked pictures. Yes, people will still get your photos without credits but with watermarks, you’ve already done that for them. A simple URL overlay on the photos you publish online can do the trick.

There are other ways too to prevent image hotlinking but that’s another thing for next time…

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Abe Olandres

Editor-in-chief

Abe is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of YugaTech with over 20 years of experience in the technology industry. He is one of the pioneers of blogging in the country and is considered by many as the Father of Tech Blogging in the Philippines.

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34 Comments

dark avenger · 12 years ago

I have been browsing online more than 4 hours today, yet I never
found any interesting article like yours. It is
pretty worth enough for me. Personally, if all website owners
and bloggers made good content as you did, the internet will be
much more useful than ever before.

Earvin · 18 years ago

Thank you! This actually convinced me not to search for the right-click disabling code anymore. I think I’ll watermark my images from now on! Wehehehehehehehhe> >;-)

eric · 20 years ago

pangit nga pag walang right click.. what i do now is add watermarks to all my images.. pangit sya pero ok na rin.. lahit papano..
and all the images in my gallery are protected against hotlinking..

ajay · 20 years ago

hmm, the watermark doesn’t look good to me. & besides, ‘twould appear too hardsell;)

alfie · 20 years ago

I agree with abe’s recommendation, putting a water mark on the photos will also help you to popularize your website.

jepaperts · 20 years ago

disabling right click won’t help. the best way to protect content and images… never publish it on the web.

ade · 20 years ago

i used to do that on my old site, but it only slowed my site down.

alfie · 20 years ago

Just go to File->Save Page As…-> then save. Then, all of the content of your web page has copied, including text, jc files and pictures. No right click involved.

ba · 20 years ago

Well, there’s control+left click for opening links in new tabs in Firefox.

But still, anti-right click sites are annoying.

noemi · 20 years ago

Like Dave, I often use right click to open a new window tab. And I get disappointed if a site disables it. But it’s also my experience that newbies often hotlink images and one of the first things they learn is right click “copy image location”.

Dave Starr · 20 years ago

Good advice. For those who think that disabling right click protects anything, they really need to learn more about what the web is all about.

I too frequently use right click to open in a new tab. When I find this feature disabled I almost always leave and don’t come back.

There’s another totally legitimate use of right clicking to look at the source code. When I see a particularly well designed site, or a feature I haven’t seen before, I often peek to see how it was done, if the blog template is custom to the site or a pubically available one, etc. Prevent me from doing this and I won’t be much of a satisfied user, anxious to see more of what’s offered.

kutitots · 20 years ago

well, if you can disable right-click, why not disable highlighting the entire page all-together? there’s nothing to CTRL+C on. :D

But then, there’s always SAVE PAGE AS…

Jaypee · 20 years ago

yeah, disabling the right click won’t stop people from ripping stuff from your site. it might lessen but not completely protect your content. view source is one way of bypassing the disabled right click. and if you are a Firefox user, disabling the right click is like cutting of one hand. hehe

Jeff · 20 years ago

They’res only one fool-proof way to protect your content: don’t publish it on the web

AhmedF · 20 years ago

Disabling right clicking is one of the most annoying things. Not that it works in FireFox anyway.

J. Angelo Racoma · 20 years ago

It’s a usability issue, too.

As for firefox–I love middle-click!

batjay · 20 years ago

i agree. you can disable the rick click button but ultimately it can’t protect your content that much as the old CNTRL-C click we’ve inherited from the MS DOS days still works in windows.