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Disabling Right-Click?

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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Avatar for Abe Olandres

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 considered by many as the Father of Tech Blogging in the Philippines. He is also a technology consultant, a tech columnist with several national publications, resource speaker and mentor/advisor to several start-up companies.

17 Responses

  1. Avatar for dark avenger dark avenger says:

    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.

  2. Avatar for Earvin Earvin says:

    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> >;-)

  3. Avatar for eric eric says:

    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..

    =)

  4. Avatar for ajay ajay says:

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

  5. Avatar for alfie alfie says:

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

  6. Avatar for jepaperts jepaperts says:

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

  7. Avatar for ade ade says:

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

  8. Avatar for alfie alfie says:

    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.

  9. Avatar for ba ba says:

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

    But still, anti-right click sites are annoying.

  10. Avatar for noemi noemi says:

    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”.

  11. Avatar for Dave Starr Dave Starr says:

    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.

  12. Avatar for kutitots kutitots says:

    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…

  13. Avatar for Jaypee Jaypee says:

    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

  14. Avatar for Jeff Jeff says:

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

  15. Avatar for AhmedF AhmedF says:

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

  16. Avatar for J. Angelo Racoma J. Angelo Racoma says:

    It’s a usability issue, too.

    As for firefox–I love middle-click!

  17. Avatar for batjay batjay says:

    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.

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