I’m looking at a web form to be filled out for a volunteer position. Its states not to copy & paste information into the form and that submittals with such content will not be considered.
This piqued my curiosity: is it possible for a web form to detect that content was copy/pasted? I imagine it must, perhaps not.
Just curious if anyone knows.
I believe this will work to prevent paste into an input field:
<input type="text" onpaste="return false;" ondrag="return false;" />
You could build on the same technique to allow pasting but detect it, or validate it differently.
I think you’re misinterpreting the statement. Translated, it means “We’re so flush with volunteers that we’re willing to make them perform stupid manual transcription rather than just pasting the available information; hence we don’t really want any new volunteers.”
I don’t think so, seeing as the position was recently posted. I think it’s more a desire to weed out bots or lazy people and force them to write their narratives on the spot.
However, I could see them posting that copy/paste will not be accepted without them actually knowing it was copy/paste (a bluff).
Just curious to see if it is even possible to detect copy/paste in a web form field that gets filled in.
But if you’re applying for a bunch of volunteer positions (for different companies) that are rather similar, you might being saying the same thing to all of them. I mean, if you want to volunteer at Blood Center of [your state] and American Red Cross doing blood drives and your local hospital doing with their blood drives, other then some very minor tweaking (which might change the true/false thing mentioned above), why not just cut and paste it. Your qualifications are the same, your reasons for wanting to do it are the same, the hours you can help out are the same.
Is asking people that apply for a job to rewrite their resume a good way to weed out the lazy people? IMO, that’s a good way to get good applicants to say ‘what a backwards company, I’ll go somewhere else’.
Now, I don’t know how long a narrative is, if it’s just a few sentences, I’d probably just retype it, but if it’s pages and pages I might see how other places pan out first, just because I’d be annoyed with that.
This is, of course, assuming you’re doing this in the privacy of your own home and not at their location. If you’re doing it there I could understand them wanting to see how you can tell them about yourself that’s sort of like a little pre-interview.
Lastly, if this is a smaller place that doesn’t really maintain their website or get droves of applicants it could be one of those things that someone programmed in years ago and they just never changed it. They’re might have been a reason for it at one time or even no real reason at all, but it’s meaningless now but they haven’t had any reason to take it down. They might not even care if you C&P (assuming they get the form), it’s just…there. I know on my store’s website, from time to time some customer will navigate into some forgotten about corner of it or find something somewhere that I put up years ago and never changed, but it’s not like I have thousands of people checking it every day and holding my feet to the fire over every little detail.
If it’s pages, I’d rather compose in WordPad and then paste it in anyway.
I can imagine the site being run by Lucy Van Pelt. She watches as pages and pages are entered manually, then pulls the plug at the last period.
To answer the OP (with my WAG); Yes,it’s possible; No, these people can’t/aren’t.
The statement is about not considering applications with clearly c/p’ed content without removing identifiers from where it originally came from, without updating the info, adjusting the date etc.
Not about letting people not compose their story in wordpad.
(At least I hope so, most other motivations or intentions make them look petty)
I have one account that I pay on a website that won’t allow pasting. I vaguely remember ctrl-v triggering a notification saying you can’t paste.
If you’re expected to write an essay about how deeply you long to serve this outfit and how well-qualified you are, then IMO …
What they really mean is “Don’t plagiarize the essay we’re using to evaluate your usefulness, sincerity, & devotion to our cause.” They *don’t *give a crap about cut and paste as a technological matter. They *do *care about your essay being your personal work, even if you submit it unchanged to a dozen similar outfits.
And the way they can detect plagiarism (if they actually care enough to check versus just issuing an empty threat as a deterrent) is the same way academics can detect plagiarism: there are plenty of specialist tools & websites that do an excellent job. Or they can just Google key passages of your essay and see what comes up.
So why do they say “Don’t cut and paste” when they mean “don’t plagiarize”? Because most people have no idea whether plagiarize means “copying others’ words” or “making pasta.” So they used dumbed-down terminology.
Plagiarism isn’t restricted to cutting and pasting. Anyone can copy anything by typing it. It’s especially easy and fast for touch typists.
I’m sure it’s technically possible to prevent pasting - as **Ruken **says, I’ve run into sites that blocked it. But I completely agree with the others here in that making people manually write some large block of text is pointless and counterproductive.
So WHAT if they have a canned “narrative” they use for such job or position applications? Why NOT make it easy for them - volunteers, especially! - to enter the information you want? Why on earth throw a meaningless hurdle into the application process - having to write in a crappy browser edit window, at the very least when I ass/u/me you want as many qualified volunteers as you can get? The process won’t even guarantee you’re getting genuine, heartfelt human input - even if they have to manually key it in, who’s to say they aren’t copying it from another window or a piece of paper?
What exactly do you think you are gaining from this restriction?
Nothing, of course, but it informs the erstwhile volunteer that the organization is run by nitwits and to avoid it at all costs.
As Ron White once said “That’s a darn useful piece of info to have right there!”
It does fall into the class of “Warning, Will Robinson! Something is WRONG with this company! Danger! Danger!” 
The times I’ve been asked to jump through some stupid hurdle on the way to a job offer have invariably been warning signs - I was once considered gold-plated material for a financial company, all but hired… but I had to take a “personality” test that was so old (ca. 1980) that it had pictures of candlestick phones and '32 coupes, and was originally copyrighted around 1919-20. I failed it, more or less intentionally… and* could not* be hired as a result. Which I found out a few years later was a good thing.
Being forced to fill out a 4-page application, by hand, poorly duplicating material that was already on my resume and reference sheet, is often a sign that the company and I are not a good match.
You can prolly disable JavaScript on the page before you paste, and then re enable it before continuing.
I do that for lots of things.
You could take a peek at the HTML source for the form (Control-U in many browsers) and see what the input code is. It might be something like tellyworth suggested in Post #2 above: Triggering a bit of JavaScript on Paste or Drag. Disabling JavaScript would circumvent that, as Claverhouse suggests.
BUT – If the form designer is clever enough (which I suspect is unlikely), it could be made to detect that JS is disabled and reject that too. It could trigger a JS function to run every time you type a character into the field (onkeypress or onchange), and be designed to fail somehow if that doesn’t happen. I would find it surprising if it were that clever.
Funnily enough enough I’ve had sites that don’t let me copy paste with the mouse, but I can ctrl+V and paste. Similar I’ve used this when I want to copy pictures that aren’t allowed to be copied. Not sure if it would work with text without breaking the page.
I’m thinking that the site doesn’t want you to copy from something like Microsoft Word and then paste it into the field. When you do that, certain characters like quotation marks and apostrophes get mangled.
Our university message board somehow adds a string of info if we paste text into the message box. It only shows up if you look at the message board in preview mode though - I can’t get it to appear before posting (as I would like to be able to edit it out), nor does it appear if accessing the board directly through the normal view.
If I cut from Word, it adds a string that looks like - Docxxx 01xxx Engxxx 0102 xxx (etc…lots of numbers and x’s). Next semester, I should try a cut and paste from Notepad to see if that does it as well.
So, yes, from my experience, there is at least one webform that can catch hidden data that will show that the text has been pasted from Word.