Web products that disable text selection. I hate them, there are 0 reasons to do that, and still it's done.

But if I don't do that, someone could come along and copy my content!

/s

@sariel "what do you mean we cannot send data directly to their printer? If they download a pdf, they will have the pdf on their client!"

My boss. Well, not anymore.

We should propose a mod to the spec to remove any copy feature

Err, i meant to say prohibit the copy-disabling feature

@Feibrix there are many printers on the Internet you can send directly to, though

@electrineer what does it mean?

@Feibrix https://cybernews.com/security/...

@electrineer LOL That sounds like a perfect solution to avoid leaving the pdf on the client: print it on an entire printer-botnet :D

Or the assholes that disable right click.

Disallowing copy and disallowing right click are done by dumb people who know nothing about how the web works.

A noob can simply screenshot and rewrite the whole thing.

A slightly cleverer person, prints the web page to pdf and copy from there.

An even cleverer person, simply fires up the console, and enters "document.oncontextmenu=null" and "document.oncopy=null"

"Disallowing this and that" is not how you protect your intellectual property. It hurts nobody but normal users who simply want to use them for personal needs.

Suing the person who keeps stealing your content, is the correct move, if he really harms your business/revenue. Or at least, report him to his hosting provider. Or, the cheapest method: simply put watermarks on your images.

@daniel-wu a slightly cleverer person (a developer) uses F12

@asgs F12 does my last point does, opening up the web console. We can also copy the text from the "inspect" section. But it's much easier to simply remove the javascript events.

@daniel-wu that's right. Manipulate the DOM to remove the "protection"

OK, I came here to draw a line between 0 and quite a few reasons to prevent selection.

No, you don't need a selection in navbar, buttons, counters, and background areas.

What your website's really required to have is user selection for *content*... in plain text.

What I observe a lot is that people take extremes, instead of making select and no-select complement each other.

It's funny how so many people rant about disabling text selection with wrong interpretation on why it's done. Like @vintprox said, disabling it for content is mostly stupid.

But the reason it's done is because if you have clickable things on your site sometimes text selection sometimes randomly gets fucked and makes the site look absolutely horrible. Especially if people click and drag or click and scroll for whatever reason.

Same with disabling zoom - sometimes iOS safari zooms in massively when focusing a form field for no reason whatsoever. Things like this are what makes it the "low effort, good enough for 90% of users" to just disable the features.

Anti plagiarism.
But u just press F12 and inspect the code. Usually they use js for this or ad a transparent overlay on the divs that contains text.