FairFax Media attempts to bring back the 1990s

Edit:

@NZStuff Stuff.co.nz News
Morning! Just FYI, we've removed the right-click image disabling so you can open all the tabs you want now. Apologies for inconvenience /GM

Edit: I'm told on Firefox 8.0.1, the alert box pops up then the context menu pops up anyway, making this "feature" doubly silly.

At some point recently FairFax added a fairly insidious little bit of JS to their stuff.co.nz news website:

function disableContextMenu(){$('.nocontextmenu').bind("contextmenu",function(e){alert('You are not permitted to download, save or email this image');return false;});}

As you can probably tell this is a modern JQuery implementation of the pleasing old 1990s "disable right click" trick popular on Geocities et al which pops an (oddly specific, somewhat redundent) alertbox instead of just letting you display a context menu when you right click certain parts of the page.

So I sent them an e-mail:

Subject: Regarding the new "right click prevention" Javascript on the "stuff.co.nz" website

Dear Sirs/Madams,

Just some feedback on this - I usually browse the site with Javascript
disabled so I'm not sure when it was added - but when I did recently
enable Javascript to view an image slideshow I discovered it and I find
it annoying (and I am not sure that it actually achieves anything
helpful).

It's definitely not going to prevent anyone "copying" an image (which
they have already done if they viewed the page anyway, by virtue of
browser caches and so on) and it just makes it difficult to share the
URI of an image or to view it in full size if you do have Javascript
enabled.

There's a good reason why this kind of silliness fell out of favour in
the 1990s. You might as well add some Javascript to make a trail of
beachballs follow the cursor around the page[1] and truly get in to
the Geocities spirit.

[1] Dynamic Drive "Image Trail Script"
<http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex13/trailer.htm>

I'll see if they bother to respond.

--Michael Fincham <michael@finch.am> 2011-12-19

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