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snopes.com prevents selecting text

Hanan Cohen [PersonRank 7]

Tuesday, April 22, 2008
16 years ago3,112 views

(I know this is not Google related but I think the participants of this forum will want to know and protest this)

http://snopes.com is a major source on Email rumors and Urban Legends.

I tried to send someone a reference to a new item there but couldn't copy text from the page. Switched to IE – nada.

View Source : document.onmousedown=disableselect

I don't know why they did it but this is so Not-Internet and so against their own interest.

Maybe some publications on this fact will make them remove this stupid trick.

Tony Ruscoe [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Ah yes, I've noticed this sneaky trick before and just switched off JavaScript to get around it.

Stephen Tordoff [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Not sure I see the point TBH, as Ctrl-A or View Source still work

Ianf [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

A sophorific, newbe-coder kind of thing... "hey, let's show everybody who's the boss." Pointless and powerful at the same time. And snopes.com is not alone about it, though most instances of this no-select "affliction" that I've run across seem to be due to awful, self-defeating and/or chaotic coding practices, not explicit choice to sabotage readers' copy action.

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