• tiramichu@lemm.ee
    19·
    1 day ago

    To be fair, this was probably not the programmer’s fault, but rather the Product Owner or User Experience Designer that decided it should be so.

    Often these things are well-intentioned, but misguided.

    Preventing pasting of password for example might have been done with the thought “If we make the user confirm their password by typing it manually a second time, they will be less likely to create their account with a wrong password” - nice idea, but shortsighted. Preventing paste may mean password managers don’t work, or your 70 year old grandmother can’t paste it in from whatever Word document she keeps all her passwords in.

    And someone might argue “people shouldn’t be keeping their password in a word doc!” and that might be true, but it’s not the role of UX to enforce best practice.

    I think modern UX is getting better, because the recognition is now that the role of UX is to allow the user to work in the way which suits them, recognising that not all users work the same way or have the same needs. Preventing copy-paste is a roadblock, and you shouldn’t do it.

    So yeah, any site that stops me copying or pasting in 2025 can certainly go to hell.

      • tiramichu@lemm.ee
        8·
        1 day ago

        Okay yes sometimes it’s the developer lol.

        I guess my point is that the software dev process is a team effort and preventing copy paste is not normally done “just for funsies”, or intentionally to frustrate the user, or because it’s standard developer practice - there’s normally a motivating cause, and it just so happens that the developer in this case happens to be the same person who has to do support for end users, and that’s where the requirement had come from.

        The reason preventing copy-paste is a go-to-hell crime (even if there are reasons) is because there are much better ways for a business to solve whatever problem motivated them disabling it. In this example for instance, send an email the user can click that proves ownership. Much less user-hostile than having them type it twice without copy-paste.

        • rumba@lemmy.zipEnglish
          5·
          1 day ago

          I’m a big fan of just sending them an auth code to the email. didn’t get it right? sign up again.

    • tyler@programming.dev
      1·
      1 day ago

      I’d argue it is the programmer’s fault. You have to take ethics classes in college for a reason. Programmers implementing terrible features is the reason we have a lot of terrible stuff in the world right now. And it’s most definitely the programmers fault, we make enough that ethics shouldn’t be an issue.

      • tiramichu@lemm.ee
        1·
        1 day ago

        The developer should always raise ethical concerns if they have them, I agree. And those above should listen.

        As for the notion that programmers are the reason for all the terrible stuff in the world then perhaps that’s kinda true, but only from the most literal sense.

        If we look at the evils that have been unleashed on this world by Facebook etc, then from a very literal perspective if no single developer ever pushed a single key on a single keyboard then none of that would have happened. But I’d struggle to say it’s solely their fault when there’s so many others involved also.

  • Thesilverpig@lemmy.mlEnglish
    9·
    1 day ago

    also whoever designed it so I can’t easily select and copy email addresses or other text on the page! Outlook is the worst offender for figuring out what to click just to copy an email but they all are terrible.