
Web pages that try to prevent the user from navigating away, why? - yummypaint
I think we have all at some point encountered a site that does its best to stop users from navigating away. Typically by sabotaging the back button functionality. Does anyone have insight into why this is done? What does the site gain? Is the decision driven by some kind of metric? Not once has this caused me to actually spend more time there, and only fuels a burning hatred of the organization at having lost my web surfing flow.
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ksaj
There is a website from which I make purchases on a monthly basis. I
discovered early on that if I hit the back button after putting an item in my
shopping cart, instead of pressing their javascript "Continue Shopping..."
button at the top of the page, it messes up the session and I end up having to
log in again to straighten things out. Thankfully I don't lose the shopping
cart contents, but this proves to be a real pita whenever I forget about their
buggy session management.

That isn't to say that this is the reason some sites disable the back button,
or that there aren't nefarious reasons for it being done, but this is one site
where I wish they _would_ do it.

So, a very small maybe, is that the sites in question are bandaging over bad
session management.

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tlb
A/B testing will often recommend it if you optimize for time spent or even for
clicks, because at least some people will click randomly until something
happens. Short-term A/B testing doesn't measure whether people hate your site
afterwards.

Be careful what you optimize for.

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WheelsAtLarge
I'm sure that some sites are willingly breaking the back button function.

I've never done it intentionally but I've developed a few sites where the back
button failed to get you back to the previous page. In my case, it was a side
effect of a designer's feature that required a javascript library of some kind
or a programmatic feature. Once you stray away from W3 standards it is very
easy to break the back button on a browser. I've never given it much thought
but if I was required to make sure the back button worked I could fix it but
I've yet to find a customer that cared enough for me to do it.

You see the problem a lot on the web since few sites want to only use the
browser standards on their site.

