Forum: Rails Spinoffs (closed, excessive spam) Disable right click menu

Hi all,

i've a page with many images on it and i have to disable right click
menu on the images of class 'items' so that's what i do:

    $$('.items').each(function (img) {
      img.observe('mousedown', function (e) {
        var button;
        if (window.event) {
          button = e.button;
        } else {
          button = e.which;
        }

        if (button > 1) {
          e.stop();
          return false;
        }
      });
      img.observe('mouseup', function (e) {
        var button;
        if (window.event) {
          button = e.button;
        } else {
          button = e.which;
        }

        if (button > 1) {
          e.stop();
          return false;
        }
      });
    });

But right click menu is still working... where's my mistake?

that seemed to work for me in FF3, make sure the 'items' class name is
on each img.

Also you might want to try the contextmenu event...

$$('.items').each(function(i) {
  i.observe('contextmenu', function(e) {e.stop();})
});

This might catch more:

$$('.items').each(function(i) {
 i.observe('contextmenu', function(e) {e.stop();})
}).observe('click',function(e) { if (e.isRightClick()) e.stop(); });

"contextmenu" (as darrin pointed out) works quite reliably, except for
Opera which simply ignores it:

$$('.items').invoke('observe', 'contextmenu', Event.stop);

-- kangax

On Jun 29, 12:10 pm, Stefano Esposito <stefano.esposit...@gmail.com>

On Jun 30, 2:10 am, Stefano Esposito <stefano.esposit...@gmail.com>
wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> i've a page with many images on it and i have to disable right click
> menu on the images of class 'items' so that's what i do:

Attempting to disable the context menu is usually done to try and stop
people copying text or images from a site.  It is futile exercise, as
anyone who wants to copy content will work out how to do it without
using the context menu.  All you end up doing is removing
functionality for no good reason, which is a really good way to annoy
users.


--
Rob

On Sun, 29 Jun 2008 23:16:37 -0700 (PDT)
RobG <rgqld@iinet.net.au> wrote:

> Attempting to disable the context menu is usually done to try and stop
> people copying text or images from a site.  It is futile exercise, as
> anyone who wants to copy content will work out how to do it without
> using the context menu.  All you end up doing is removing
> functionality for no good reason, which is a really good way to annoy
> users.

Poor, little Troll :P

Thanks for the contextmenu hint, it worked like a charm... not
on Opera, of course, but i don't have to support it, luckily enough. :)

Ciao,
Stefano

Actually, RobG is a regular contributer and gives some pretty good
advice. I certainly wouldn't stick a "troll" label on him so quickly.

> Attempting to disable the context menu is usually done to try and stop
> people copying text or images from a site.  It is futile exercise, as
> anyone who wants to copy content will work out how to do it without
> using the context menu.  All you end up doing is removing
> functionality for no good reason, which is a really good way to annoy
> users.

Locking down source is a futile effort, but allowing custom context
menus is a fabulous feature.  I find the Context Menu in Google
Documents to be quite a delightful UI option, I would have no use for
the standard menu in that view.

--
Matt Foster
Ajax Engineer
Nth Penguin, LLC
http://www.nthpenguin.com

On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 3:58 PM, Matt Foster <mattfoster01@gmail.com> 
wrote:
> Locking down source is a futile effort, but allowing custom context
> menus is a fabulous feature.  I find the Context Menu in Google
> Documents to be quite a delightful UI option, I would have no use for
> the standard menu in that view.

True enough, but this thread is clearly about blocking right-clicks on
certain elements (images) for the sole purpose of stopping people from
saving the images.

-justin (not a troll)

At the risk of being called a troll, I thought I'd just ask:  Why not
use image cloaking?  Doing that would prevent users from saving images
even better than the right-click disable, as it would also prevent
them from saving the image by dragging it from the page to their
desktop.

With cloaking, you'd write some css to place a transparent gif
directly over the images you want to protect, so that when users tried
to save the image, they'd just end up with the transparent image,
instead of the one you don't want them to save.  This would also cover
the ol' drag off the page trick, where the right click option
wouldn't.

I'm on the anti-disable-right-click side of the fence, obviously, as
there are more features in that contextual menu than just 'save this
image'. There's also 'bookmark this page', and I'd imagine you'd want
your users to have access to that. :)


On Jun 29, 11:10 am, Stefano Esposito <stefano.esposit...@gmail.com>

On 01 Jul 2008, at 17:26, Jeff Keen wrote:

> the ol' drag off the page trick, where the right click option
> wouldn't.
>
> I'm on the anti-disable-right-click side of the fence, obviously, as
> there are more features in that contextual menu than just 'save this
> image'. There's also 'bookmark this page', and I'd imagine you'd want
> your users to have access to that. :)

Still, View Page Source will still get the user what he wants. It's a
fake sense of security. The only way to protect images on your website
from distribution, is by visible watermarking (using RMagick for
example). Then they can save all they want, the picture will never be
usable somewhere else without having your mark on it, no matter how
subtle it is. So: watermark the image using RMagick, write it away in
a public accessible file (with the watermark) for caching, so you
don't have to run each image through RMagick every time (only the non-
watermarked pictures will need to be generated).


Best regards

Peter De Berdt

The only other thing i can think of is actually making Ajax requests and
using the css hack of embedding images as binary arrays in css.  That 
way
they can only get binary data out of your system.  But even that 
probably
has its problems.... bottom line if you dont want people to steal.. then 
you
are probably going to have to use proprietary systems like flash... but 
then
again print screen is always avaialable.  If its on the web then its 
fair
game.

Michael Stephens

Electrical Engineering Graduate Student
University of Wyoming
falcon@uwyo.edu or 89iroc@gmail.com

On Tue, Jul 1, 2008 at 10:48 AM, Peter De Berdt 
<peter.de.berdt@pandora.be>