12.21.2006

Snopes Forgets That Users Have Needs

I went to this page today:
http://www.snopes.com/politics/business/cell411.asp due to my mother sending me a forwarded email. My response on these is always, always to copy and paste the text of the page and reply with it. I usually throw in the URL of the page as well.

Snopes has evidently decided that that's no longer ok. They have disabled the ability for a user to select anything on the page. It's not, no matter what the RIAA would have you believe, illegal to copy some copyrighted text to show it to someone you know, as long as you're not making money off of it.

Snopes has always been one of the worst sites for ad pop-ups and annoying flashing banner ads.

They've just gone one step further.

This is crazy. If you make you site so, so difficult for users to use, it has no use. I will not go to Snopes if I can't reply to an email with a detailed email. (I, in fact, saved the bloody file locally and cut the content using Dreamweaver. This is b/c I'm a stubborn b****.)

I have a greater concern than Snopes being evil. My concern is that this will become an industry standard for sites such as cnn. Suddenly the entirely usable internet will be, frankly, not so usable.

Here's the code:
<SCRIPT type=text/javascript>
<!--
var omitformtags=["input", "textarea", "select"]
omitformtags=omitformtags.join("")
function disableselect(e){
if (omitformtags.indexOf(e.target.tagName.toLowerCase())==-1)
return false
}
function reEnable(){
return true
}
if (typeof document.onselectstart!="undefined")
document.onselectstart=new Function ("return false")
else{
document.onmousedown=disableselect
document.onmouseup=reEnable
}
-->
</SCRIPT>

Using it is selling your soul to the Satan of Web Developers and will result in your facing eternity in a room fixing broken links in Notepad on a 13 inch flickering 16 color monitor.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Greasemonkey is a Firefox plugin that may help- assuming you hit an affected page using Firefox...

Yet Another Girl said...

I'm more concerned that this kind of behavior will spread accross the internet like an evil pandemic flu....