How to bypass a website’s copy-paste restriction

The Problem

Many websites have taken to restricting the user’s ability to copy-paste. Most of the time the restriction is limited to a secondary password field, which makes sense because they want to make sure you typed your password correctly. If you made a typo when picking a password, and then just copy-paste that same erroneous password into the verification field, you could end up unable to login to your account. The same trick is usually used to stop people from skipping re-entering their e-mail.

But where it gets really annoying is when there’s a lot to type up. I’ve seen websites that have a blanket prohibition in place on most of their fields. So if you’ve spent ages typing something up, did a ctrl-a and ctrl-c to copy your work prior to submission, and then your browser crashed or your session timed out and you find yourself with a copied wall of text and no way to paste it into the field, there’s an easy solution.

The Solution

Step 1: First, get yourself Google’s Chrome browser. I’m not sure whether this’ll work with other browsers.

Step 2: Select the field that’s causing you trouble and right click it. Then choose “inspect element” from the bottom of the contextual menu.

Step 3: There’s likely a section in the highlighted line of code that says onpaste=”return false;” or something along those lines.

Step 4: Double click on the part that says return false and change it to return true. Now simply close the code editor, and proceed to paste your previously copied text!