For my site I need to find out if a user navigates to a link on my page. 'Normal' clicks can be easily captured, however I also want to find out if the user uses the contextmenu on a link to navigate to an URL.
I know I can find out when the user does a right mouse button click (contextmenu), but I have no idea how to find out whether the user navigates to the link after that (e.g. clicks on 'open in new tab').
Is it even possible to do? Or perhaps there is some other method of finding out when the user navigates to an URL on the page?
You can do what facebook/google and others do, ensure all outbound links go through your own internal refer/log, ie:
http://example.com/r=http://someSite.example.com/foobar...
There's no assurances you can do anything better than this with javascript, but you can bind a function to listen in on link clicks with the second-mouse-button, and set up some hackish ensure-other-page-loads-eventually mechanism with server-side code, but that's just way out there and I'd highly advise against that.
Just stick with the thing google/facebook does, everything else is a cheap unstable hack that isn't worth the effort.
Related
I have a heavily interactive page that, while it does not use a form, does have objects that maintain state. This state is completely messed up when someone navigates away from the page and then comes back to it again with the back button. So, I'd like to be able to detect when someone uses the "back" button to navigate to my page, and have it reset the content at that point. How can I accomplish this?
I found one other question that addressed this issue, but it is very out-of-date (from 2011), doesn't mention anything about support for Chrome, and I'd rather not use JQuery if I don't have to (I'm not using it anywhere else at the moment).
My requirement is to display a customized confirm box when the user leaves a page without saving form data.
I used the window.onbeforeunload event it is displaying google chrome related predefined confirm box. When the user changes any form and trying to reload, tab close or route change I want to display a $mdDialog.confirm and asking user to leave the page or stay on the same page. How do I make one?
For security reasons, this cannot be done. You can find more details in the MDN page on the beforeunload event.
In the past, you could return a custom string that was displayed to the user, but these days even that is ignore. The best you can do is instruct the page to show the standard dialog that you already have. (And in some browsers and some scenarios, even that instruction may be ignored.)
An alternative is to include a button in the page for leaving the form. Although that still does not prevent users from navigating away from the page directly, if it is sufficiently visible, in many cases users are more likely to click that than navigating directly. It also serves as a passive reminder that the form needs explicit saving or cancelling (depending on your specific details, of course).
There are some video streaming sites that pop up an ad anytime you click anywhere on the page. The problem is, you have to click on the page to press play! So I was thinking of making a UserScript that disables the script that does this. The only problem is, I already disable all the scripts on the site and when I do it still pops up. Is there a way that I can disable them ? I'm also using jQuery, so if I can do it through their interface, that would be great.
edit: Two perfect examples of such sites are daclips.in and gorrilavid.in
I have Adblocker Plus, and it seems like it is not recognizing "on Click" events as pop-ups, rather normal clicked links. And the logic is simple, no Adblocker will block you from clicking something intentionally and it (the link) opening in another window/tab.
The problem is the new window contains your clicked Url, while the original window/tab "Refreshes" (i.e. redirects) to another url.
Advertising companies seem to use this trick to bypass adblocking software.
Just ditch Chrome and use Firefox. Firefox already have built-in mouse-click popups. I think all addons like Adguard or Adblock can not disable mouse-click popups. If you use Firefox, these are the steps:
Type about:config in the browser's address bar and hit the enter key.
First time users need to confirm that they be careful on the next page.
Type or paste dom.popup_allowed_events into the search field.
The value of the preference highlights all events that are allowed to spawn popups.
Edit the value to remove some or all of the items here.
Why not just use a browser extension such as AdBlock?
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/adblock/gighmmpiobklfepjocnamgkkbiglidom?hl=en
My go-to is right click and open in new tab. onClick events only happen with a left click. It's cumbersome but it still ends up being less work than closing the pop-up and whatever annoying prompts it may have.
I do not there's a practical solution for this.
Moreover, I think some of the answers here are missing the specific case in OP, where clicking anywhere on the page will cause the pop up to happen, not just clicking on links. According to this, neither right-clicking then choosing "open", nor noticing and blocking the target URL will help. I do not know of an add blocker that helps here either, because it's not trivial to meaningfully filter a click event that is taking place on the whole page object.
Only the solution provided by #Monkey would work, at the drawback of possibly breaking other things.
Our application forbids going back for several reasons.
Basically because that's just how our application works (JSF with facelets as GUI)
You always have to enter on the welcome site, once you chose an application-flow you can only leave / abort when you tell the application (e.g. press a button). If you just browse away e.g. enter "example.com" in the address bar the state of your flow gets saved and once you relogin, you can resume the work. Going back is only possible when it was specifically designed like this with a 'back' submit - button.
Of course users keep pressing the 'back' button (i would do so as well) and they keep getting 'error: session out of synch'. This is a learning process and a couple years ago we just disabled the back-button to make things clear. Sadly this is no longer supported.
So instead of teaching the user the hard way and forcing him to relogin, are there some good alternatives I'm missing?
i found this link which should offer 3 methods to disable the back button - but in reality it just further confirms the fact that it is impossible to do it in a semi-nice way.
when the user tries to go to a previous page you can redirect him to the page he should be at in other words catch the "out of sync" and redirect him
You might find a workable solution here How do I insert an entry into browsing history via JavaScript
by inserting an extra step into the browser's history (perhaps a link to the current page with query string parameters that result in a nice big red box message to the user), or you could try attaching an event handler to the OnBeforeUnload event so the user gets a confirmation dialog when trying to leave the page (you'd want to remove the handler when the submit button was clicked).
I've been dealing with a bane-of-my-existence Javascript problem involving tracking when a user clicks on a link (in case you're curious, here it is: Why does using target="_blank" cause Javascript to fail?).
I've figured out that I can solve the problem by tracking an onMousedown event rather than an onClick event.
I'm curious about the downsides of this approach. The ones I can think of:
If a user clicked down on a link and then moved the mouse off the link before releasing it, then the event would be recorded even though the user hadn't visited the link
If a user used the tab key to move the browser focus to the link and then hit enter, the click would not be recorded
Neither of these are common, so I'm not terribly worried about them.
Are there any other downsides I'm missing?
One more: mousedown captures right / middle clicks too.
But for your two reasons, I would stick to onclick. I know quite a few people who use keyboard nav. Especially search-and-gotolink in FF.(/ to search followed by enter to go to the link).
But if these two are not a problem for you, I think right / middle clicks wouldn't be too.
I think the way to track all the users who follow the link is quite tricky -- the user could right click and click on new tab / new window...