how do you disable "view source" button?

[apsadmin]

Hi all,

Cruising the web I ran across a site that had the view source option disabled in my IE browser. Neat trick I thought, so how do I implement it? I'm using dreamweaver and IE.

[HardCoded]

Please see this thread.
http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic.php?t=12575
The consensus there is that it's an irritating and ineffective thing to do.

[matauri]

Its a waste of time trick. Go to View on your menu & you can view source there. Go to Save & save the site & view the source there. Dont go wasting your time or bandwidth with silly features like that.

Ditto to HardCoded, that is one of the threads that have covered this.... there has been pages & pages of other threads discussing this topic.

[apsadmin]

no - no - no,

All those links address graphic thieves, how to protect your graphics, etc... thats not what I want to know. I want to know how to disable the "view > source" button in IE. Go here for an example:
http://www.new-frontier.info/od_minimal.gif
You will notice that the "source" button is disabled. Neat, eh? When you get there give it a minute...then the expanded view button comes onto the screen, click it and you see a normal page. In either state, the "source" button on the browser toolbar is disabled, but the other right click buttons still work. Howdodeydodat? Time to let the hounds on the scent..haaaaaarrrrrruuuuuuuu.

O.K, you genuises, give.

[HardCoded]

Since when could you view source on a gif?

[apsadmin]

your right hardcoded,

When I went back to check it out it was non functional. Since the site "looks" like its jammed with links to other data, I thought they worked like a real page, but when i click on them, they go nowhere. Damn. I do want to know how to disable "view > source" in the toolbar without disabling right click for everything else, but i can see this site is not the example I thought it was. But, does anyone know how to do this with a real website, not just a .gif, without losing the right click features?

[matauri]

Ditto again HardCoded... view source on an image?

I went into the rest of that site & could view the source of every page I went to.

[matauri]

#1... why would you want to?
#2... as soon as I saved the page I could have the source code anyway
#3... if I viewed it in a browser with developer tools I can view it too

Why waste the time & resources?

[apsadmin]

Its not for me, its for a friend of mine. He is in a biz, where his competiton is a small circle, everyone knows everyone, and everyone is constantly ripping every one else off. This is not a "learned" community (tailors, you know...clothes) who are not that computer savvy, and even though its easy to get around for you guys, it might give him some relief from his "basic point and click" competition.
Even very "basic" tricks should confound most of them.

[matauri]

What is he trying to protect though?

Even if we gave you a script to do what you ask, someone can still copy the text by just copying & pasting. The images can still be downloaded & saved. Even the most basic user can do that.

If one of their competitors wanted to snaffle anything on the site, they would only have to select all, copy & paste it into Word, and there is your layout too.

Best advice to give friend is.... once it's on the web it's there for the taking, and even the most basic of user can do it.

[apsadmin]

maturi,

You are right, of course. But I will have to maintain my point that they do not know these tricks. I have worked with these people, and I know. They hire the help, and most can't afford to do so to satisfy a simple curiousity. Not only that, but most of the site has been built in photoshop, with most of its text contained in graphics, which defeats any basic users attempt to highlight, then copy the text. With the addition of disabling the source button it should give him some relief.
Anyone else?

[HardCoded]

I hope you're not feeling picked on, but...

most of the site has been built in photoshop, with most of its text contained in graphics, which defeats any basic users attempt to highlight, then copy the text.

This also disables the people you want to read the text from reading the text. Namely Google et al.

There is NO JavaScript way to disable View Source in the menu bar. There might be a way with VBScript but I'm no VBScript user. Best do a search on it.

Here's a list of methods that *will* work:
http://www.vortex-webdesign.com/help/hidesource.htm

In all seriousness, given the people you are targeting, it might be effective enough to put all your stuff in framesets and disable the context menu

<script>
  document.oncontextmenu=function(){ return false; }
</script>

Then your tailors will have to view source on the frameset, get the frame src, then paste that in the browser, view source on that, etc.

But generally you are way wasting your time that would better be spent on SEO.

Here's another example of a waste of time. Yellow Pages sites in Canada and the States go out of their way to make their stuff non-browseable and non-spiderable. Who does that hurt? Just them, since Google has absolutely no way of spidering their stuff either. They could have increased the traffic to their sites by at least five times. Suffice it to say I have a database of 1.3 million Canadian businesses (i.e. all of them, or at least all of them that have businesses phone numbers) gleaned from a spider I wrote in about three hours.

My long-winded point: in general, these types of tricks do more harm to you than they benefit, since they don't fulfill the originl intent. Ever.

[spice]

Sounds like you're trying the wrong solution to a problem here. If you're worried about tech-illiterate people stealing your code, why not instead make it highly unattractive for them to do so? Write code that detects the server running it... if it's not yours, it throws up a big message like "This code is stolen." So now your competitors are showing a big unfriendly unprofessional message to all their visitors. Should put a stop to that sort of thing real quick.

Having text rendered as graphics is a pretty stupid idea for a lot of reasons, including the ones already mentioned.

[bMind]

There is another way you can do this is to encrypt your code. You will then only see encrypted characters from the source code. I am not too sure how it would affect your search engine ranking but you may find HTML encryption softwares everywhere that you can download for free. If your site is done in PHP programming and you want to take the risk to encrypt your code, I have a file that you can use. All you need to do is put the file in your server somewhere and include the file in every single one of your php file that you want to encrypt, it will then do the work.

[splinter]

You guys might find this discussion interesting. It's very long.

http://www.codingforums.com/showthre...?t=4437&page=1

[sfowler]

I think if they are too tech illiterate to copy the text out from the browser, then the source code is not going to mean much to them anyway. Just copying out a single page is not very helpful, since everything points into Nirvana. Just put all absolute links on the page and they will end up with their customers landing on your site!