[Bug] DOM - Allow copy paste doesn't work (on this site)

[eabase]

Is there an existing issue for this?

• I have searched the existing issues

Current Behavior

I was trying to copy paste the header on the following page, which is disabled.

Found your bookmarklets but the bookmarklets is URL encoded in Firefox) so they didn't work.
I then URL decoded them and saved again. But doesn't seem to work.

• https://zulip.com/api/configuring-python-bindings#configuring-the-python-bindings

This BM:

• https://thomasleplus.github.io/bookmarklets/#DOM-Allow-copy-paste

Any idea what's going on here?

(I've come across many other pages like this in the past.)

---

Expected Behavior

that it works

version

n/a

Relevant log output

none

Steps To Reproduce

I just told you

Anything else?

I had to use this site to convert your bookmarklet:

• https://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/dencoder/

Maybe we need a bookmarklet to do this conversion automatically?

I also tried to use: browser.urlbar.decodeURLsOnCopy True from about:config, but that didn't do anything either.

[eabase]

Maybe related to this?

From here:

• https://www.reddit.com/r/software/comments/vfcv00/copy_text_from_the_websites_which_dont_allow/

---

[thomasleplus]

Hi @eabase,

I've been looking at the zulip.com page that you sent and so far I am not able to understand what prevents the copy/paste. To be honest I am sure there are many ways to prevent it and I doubt that a simple bookmarklet will ever succeed in circumventing all of them. I'll investigate jcunews1 suggestion as it seems pretty simple.

I am curious about the need to convert my bookmarklet as this is not something that I usually need to do. Do you mind explaining a bit more step by step how you tried to save my bookmarklet when it didn't work (before you solved it with the conversion), I'd be interested in reproducing that issue too to see if I can solve that too.

Thanks for taking the time to report your issues. That's the only way I can know such issues exist and fix them.

Cheers,

Tom

[thomasleplus]

I've implemented the suggestion from jcunews1 plus a few others that I found on the web. Sadly it's still not working well on zulip.com. After using the new version of the bookmarklet, I managed after a couple of tries to select the header and then I can copy it with ctrl-c (but right-clicking still doesn't work).

[eabase]

When I save the BM from your page, by either dragging link or drop it in a bookmark folder, it drops the URL encoded script (as shown above), this script is not executable by browser. It literally trying to execute all the %xx stuff. IDK how to explain it better.

Or maybe I'm just doing it all wrong?

[thomasleplus]

Weird, I am not reproducing your issue when saving a bookmarklet. I dragged a bookmarklet from https://thomasleplus.github.io/bookmarklets/ znd dropped it into the bookmark toolbar of a brand new install of Firefox and it worked.

On the page above, I do URL encode the Javascript to turn it into a bookmarklet but I believe this is the right way to go. Bookmarklets are URLs (starting with javascript:) so it makes sense to me that they should be encoded as such.

[eabase]

ok, so maybe I'm the idiot?

I just:

• drag/dropped the DuckDuckGo - Search selection on bookmark toolbar, then
• selected the text YouTube, and then
• clicked on the bookmarklet.
• ✅ It worked.

So then the question is, how is the select text from websites that doesn't allow it, supposed to work?

[thomasleplus]

If the site doesn't allow you to select, the first step would be to allow selection with the "Allow copy paste" bookmarklet and then you can use any of the selection-based bookmarklet. But of course that's assuming that the "Allow copy paste" bookmarklet actually works and as we can see on zulip.com, it's not 100% :(

[eabase]

@thomasleplus
Any idea what kind of black magic they apply to prevent this?