Hide Plugin script from "View-Source" Users

[Incognitus]

Any suggestions?

Thanks!

[Todge]

Depending on how a plugin is created the coding will not be directly viewable in the source anyway, as it will be loaded in from outside.

Other than that all you can do is 'obfuscate' the code, making it more unreadable.. There are a few sites that can do this for you, but be aware than any plugin you submit to the library will have to be in it's native form, obfuscated code will be rejected.

[Brian]

Adding to the above, even if you obfuscate your code it has to be on the page in order for it to run. There's no way to run code in a user's browser without actually sending that code to the user. That's the nature of how web pages operate.

No matter how a page loads its HTML or scripts a user is going to have the ability to see it one way or another whether that be through viewing the source of the page, finding the Javascript file that runs a specific plugin in the source of the page, or through inspecting the Network tab of their browser's console.

[Incognitus]

Here is a sort of example of what I mean, though a slight abstraction: View Source at this Link

Note how you don't just see the guts of the forum spilling out in the Source View, but rather it's a bunch of references and frames and whatnot.

Do any plugins or scripts offer something like this?

[Brian]

You can view the source of those frames, though, which will result in you being able to see the source code of the embedded pages. Chrome even has an option to do this in the context menu that appears when right-clicking each frame, while in other browsers you could navigate to the URLs those iframes are pointing to and view the source there.

dev.prbrds.com/b/o/jJfKIXFnxBLptqDoetJM.png

ProBoards forums are not able to be placed in iframes, and placing a page in an iframe does not prevent a user from viewing its source code.

As stated previously the source code has to be visible to the user because that's what's telling the browser how to construct the page.

[Incognitus]

Jun 8, 2018 11:08:19 GMT -8 Brian said:

You can view the source of those frames, though, which will result in you being able to see the source code of the embedded pages. Chrome even has an option to do this in the context menu that appears when right-clicking each frame, while in other browsers you could navigate to the URLs those iframes are pointing to and view the source there.

dev.prbrds.com/b/o/jJfKIXFnxBLptqDoetJM.png

ProBoards forums are not able to be placed in iframes, and placing a page in an iframe does not prevent a user from viewing its source code.

As stated previously the source code has to be visible to the user because that's what's telling the browser how to construct the page.

Fair enough, thanks! (and that is a great explanation of the role of Source Code too, by the way)