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by quesera 1888 days ago
> Browsers fire a copy event when you copy, just like a click event fires when you press on a button. We just added analytics to it like we would any other feature on the site.

This is a bit misleading.

More accurate would be: Stack Overflow is able to configure our web pages to track certain of your activities on the page, including Copy and Click. We do that.

1 comments

This is a bit misleading; "onclick" and "oncopy" are part of the HTML standard that "must be supported by all HTML elements [...] and that must be supported by all Document objects"

[1] https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/webappapis.html#handl...

[2] https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/webappapis.html#handl...

That's right, but nothing mandates that the web page configures these event handlers, and sends these events to the tracking server operated by Stack Overflow.

My point is: "We can make this thing happen, and we do so and record the results" is more accurate than "this interesting thing just happens, and we observe" which is the tone of the original.

Most sites do not configure their pages to track copy events. SO does the unusual thing. They should be honest about that.