disabling "save page as"

[avermat]

I have a subscription based website and I want to prevent someone from EASILY saving every page.

Is it possible to disable someone from clicking "save page as"? Maybe there's not a 100% effective way, but something is better than nothing.

[g1smd]

Since it is the browser UI, then no you can't disable it. I believe that XP SP2 makes it even harder for you by not allowing chromeless windows in IE either.

Even if you could disable it, all the user has to do is browse round to the cache folder and copy it from there. The browser downloads the page and stores it there, and then the rendering engine takes it from there to display it.

[victor]

One easy solution is to pad all pages with hidden text and so on so that they exceed the average hard disk's capacity (80 Gigabytes of padding should be enough in most cases).

[johnnie]

Sorry, there is simply no way to effectively hide your HTML-code :)

Which is a good thing actually, as this open-source character makes it easy to learn from others :)

[Lance]

Well, you could disable client caching server side. (IIS Instructions [support.microsoft.com]) Then display your main content within an <object id="DontStealMe"></object> and set the source using a linked js file.

It certainly won't prevent anyone with half a clue from accessing your content, but just a casual "Save As" will not give anything meaningful.

[g1smd]

... and I guess that search engines wouldn't be able to parse that either, so no indexing or ranking for the site?

[BillPosters]

victor wrote:
One easy solution is to pad all pages with hidden text and so on so that they exceed the average hard disk's capacity (80 Gigabytes of padding should be enough in most cases).

Nice one.
You almost had me thinking you were serious for a second.

[victor]

Quite right, Bill, it was a little joke.....

Hidden text is bad for search engines.

Much better to use 80Gig of repeated &nbsp;

Most modems will compress that to almost nothing, so it will take almost no extra time to download (to the nearest hour, allowing for some server overhead).

[edited by: victor at 7:49 pm (utc) on Aug. 20, 2004]

[BillPosters]

Alright, don't milk it. ;)

[Lance]

... and I guess that search engines wouldn't be able to parse that either, so no indexing or ranking for the site?

The search engines wouldn't index the particular content that was concealed this way, of course. Had the original poster asked how to make his pages rank higher in SE's, then my answer would have been different.