No longer able to highlight text in fics

[twitchy-bunnies.livejournal.com]

Not just me, right? If this is permanent, my best guess is that it was done to deter plagiarism by putting an end to people being able to just right-click copy whole stories.

10/11/2013 update: "Basic copy protection of story content within modern browsers. Currently it is enabled for all but authors will be able to disable/enable this feature in a coming update."

http://blog.fictionpress.com/2013/10/11/languages-for-navigation/#comments

No clue why they're just now telling us this, but hallelujah at it being optional \o/

Comments

[lordhellebore]

It's the same for me, too. And preventing plagiarism sounds like the only reasonable explanation. Though it makes reccing/discussion way more annoying, having to type out excerpts etc.

[dannylionthe1st.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure about the other browsers, but in Chrome you can click "View Page Source" scroll down and it's there. Granted, it's one giant paragraph, but you can always control F to find what you were looking for. It's a little harder, but that's a work around if you don't want to type. :)

[roeskva]

It's same here too. Which is actually pretty annoying, as I post on ffnet first, and then copy-paste my fic on another archive - this is the only way I have found to make that archive not screw up my formatting. Nothing else seems to work.

Fortunately, the block on ffnet can easily be circumvented. The easiest thing in firefox (probably work other places as well), is to click "View" -> "Page style" -> "No style".

Yes, the top of the page and such looks ugly, but the fic itself is fine :) Works for me, at least.

[twitchy-bunnies.livejournal.com]

Just tried this out and it worked for me as well; thank you ;DD

[montara81.livejournal.com]

I've installed the Add-on: Greasemonkey and then the userscript: Fanfiction net, make text selectable again. Now I can copy-paste like before :)

[magicamethyst80.livejournal.com]

I know I sound silly for asking, but where is "view."

[roeskva]

The menu bar at the top of the browser window.

[magicamethyst80.livejournal.com]

The one that says "Firefox," sorry to do this to you.
Actually just found it, now I have my options back!

[redswordheart.livejournal.com]

Same for me. I thought my mouse was acting up. I tried disabling JavaScript and am still unable to select and copy text.

[(Anonymous)]

Seems to be an issue in most browsers. Someone posted on the blog that copy/paste is still working in IE8, so I went and checked on my old laptop, and it is.

Weird that they'd disable it in everything else but not in IE8

[roeskva]

Glad you got it to work :)

[roeskva]

As far as I understand, it is a CSS thing they have done. That is why it works to use "No style" for page style. That turns off any CSS on a page.

IE8 doesn't interpret CSS correctly (different, at any rate) - that was one of the problems with it, but now it seems to have become a feature :)

[jillyjames]

seems like this 'change' hinders the readers more than plagiarizers. There are too many ways to get at the text to really hinder someone who wants to steal it. But it seriously impacts the ability of readers to save works. We all know how often stories are purged, and copying off your favorites is the only sane thing to do if you want to be able to read it again.

As it stands now, I'll have to dedicate a browser to using ff.net, and disable styles. Very annoying.

[(Anonymous)]

Extortion in the ffnet forums posted this fix for firefox users:
1) Download RightToClick add-on
2) Install, restart firefox as prompted
3) Click on add-on button on your browser: looks like a yellow thin mouse arrow.
Note: You only need the "Disable page cut/copy/paste/text-selection handlers" option checked. You can also specify to always use this on ffnet rather than having to click the button every time.

I don't know if there are similar add-ons for Chrome, IE, or Safari. Opera reportedly has no problems.

[jillyjames]

In which forum is this being discussed?

[(Anonymous)]

http://www.fanfiction.net/topic/20103/98104089/1

[(Anonymous)]

Apparently I can't post a link (spam), so:
Forums -> Search for "Fanfic Help Desk" -> Topic "impossible to highlight text"

[jillyjames]

Thank you! There's also a lot of traffic on this on the ff.net blog. I'm trying to keep on top of conversations on the subject to see if anyone from ff.net ever chimes in on the subject.

PS I'm apparently spam too!

[roseriotgrrrl.livejournal.com]

Thanks that worked perfectly!

[(Anonymous)]

I have been victim of people cut and pasting from my stories to theirs (both between fanfiction.net and outside to other blogs) I was happy to see that fanfiction.net is at least attempting to address the problem. Too bad that it can be so easily circumvented.

[(Anonymous)]

Thanks. That's way better than what I come up with. I'm copying stories to my mobile book reader and the block is pretty annoyng

[(Anonymous)]

I agree that it would be good to put in some story protection measures, but I feel that this is the wrong way to go about it. Like you said, it's rather easy to circumvent. I can't personally think of a way to avoid the stories being copied to outside blogs, but I think that they could put in some kind of text search-and-match thing that would look for similar (as in, almost the same) chapters already posted and not allow for the posting of a new one without review.

Of course, with the number of stories, that might be an expensive algorithm.

[(Anonymous)]

I actually use highlighting to keep track of where i am.
Also, Ctrl+a still works.
Fanfiction.net tried and failed.

[dmxrated.livejournal.com]

It says in the site's Terms of Service that the site's staff are not responsible for protecting anyone's work, only the work's owner is. A better idea might be to create a feature that allows Google to find matches or near-matches of text anywhere on the Internet, if such a thing doesn't exist already. I have recently seen something similar that allows people to find photoshopped or the original versions of a given image, so it can't be that hard.

[twitchy-bunnies.livejournal.com]

Does it? After Ctrl+Ai'ing, when I tried to paste in notepad, only the area where the summary is actually showed up. Is there something else I need to do?

oh, just for highlighting - never mind!