A couple of days back, one of my clients contacted me and asked me to disable right-click on his site.
When I asked him the reasons why, he told me that he was tired of copy/paste bloggers. I informed him about plagiarism and how he can file a DMCA against them. Or if these blogs were using auto RSS blogs, I told him how he could offer partial feeds instead of a complete feed.
But he still wanted to disable right-click (and copying of text).
Since his blog posts are being copied to hundreds of forums, it was still a good idea to disable right-click as it might reduce the number of copied posts.
In this article, I’m talking about a plug and play WordPress plugin named WP-Copyright-Protection. When you install and activate this plugin, clear your cache and you will see that you can’t select text or right-click anywhere on your site.
This plugin doesn’t come with any configuration panel and it’s simple to install and activate. The plugin will start working immediately on your site. Though I would suggest you only use this plugin when you are in complete need as disabling right-click/selection of text deteriorates user experience.
Anyways, I would love to know your opinion on disabling right-click or text selection in WordPress. What do you think? Should a webmaster disable such feature? Is it going to give a bad reader experience? If you have disabled right-click in the past, do let us know which method you used and what your reasons were for doing so.
Great Plugin Dude. I liked it
This might put off a lot of content thieves. It isn’t 100% as you can still click View and bring up the source code and get the content that way, but that is a bit too long for your average thief.
I have seen few blog’s who disable right clicks just because people only come to copy not to read. I know how to do this in blogger but was not aware of WordPress. Thanks to you that now i can suggest people to use WP-Copyright-Protection plugin to disable right click.
One more wordpress plugin that is Blog protector for Disable Right Click and text Selection on wordpress. It will save your content .
Only useful when scrappers who copy manually. But no use when they use some auto robot plugin when it fetches from rss feeds. Thank you so much for sharing!
Ya.. It’s a nice stuff to avoid right click in WordPress. In my opinion disabling the java script may stop this plugin’s work. Anybody tried?
I was thinking I should do this in blog but could not find how.. That for this. I would love to do so.
The client might feel better, but scrapers don’t copy sites manually. It won’t make much of a dent to the copying. As you pointed out, DMCA is the most powerful weapon in a blogger’s armory.
This plugin will be effective against the new bloggers who even does not know that copy pasted work is not good for their blog as well as ruin the reputation of their blog.
Harsh,
Looks like a great plugin to reduce “copycats”
I wonder if they are able to copy the page source though?
By using FF addons, we can view the page source? I am not sure about it, but if someone has “more” knowledge than right clicking, they still can copy I guess.
Hi Harsh… really a nice post.. but i have a question.. i want to know that how can i make single title in my posts.. coz my title + my blog titles are coming together in my pots
Plagiarism is becoming more common these days.. I’m getting almost 50+ span pingbacks from autoblogs daily.. 🙁
It might little useful to protect the copy paste system but what about Ctrl+C . Spammer will you this to copy . Is their any way to disable this also ?
This is really helpful for those who wants to disable right click,Thanks harsh for the post..
I have a doubt!
This plugin will definitely use Javascript to do this job. But if we disable Javascript in the web browser or use Lynx – will this plugin work??
Ya.It will not work if JavaScript is disabled.
I think Such a feature will not give bad reader experience. but it may control copy bloggers a bit not much.
It will definitely hurt the visitors…
I have used this plugin in my earlier blogs, but right now i dont think it is necessary for blogs. If someone copy your content then search engine will not rank the blog for copied content. So i dont have to worry more about this plugin.
does it work even when javascript is disabled in browser ? because there are many plugins which use js to disable right click. But, that can be overcome by disabling javascript support in the browser.
Though the copy paste problem is really considerable, but disabling right click prevents legitimate uses like quote. I have left blogs when I could not select text and copy them when writing about them. Its really poor experience and the worst solution you can have.
What about PrintScreen and OCR applications?
What about Ctrl+C?
There are a million other ways to copy a blog.
Disabling right click is the worst thing you can do to a website. It only brings in Bad User Experience (Right Click -> New Tab?), nothing else.
That’s really good opinion by Suresh!