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Comment by jfb | Hacker News Reader

I used Glimmerblocker to nuke all Javascript from the Times because of this. What is it about newspaper websites that encourages what I can only assume are normally rational developers to misbehave so unbelievably badly?

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These terrible, tacky tack-ons have little to no relationship to what the developers would do... unless those same developers are also in charge of partner programs.

Exactly, I can't count the times I've butted heads with our marketing, design and business development teams over silly, annoying and outright ridiculous features they had charged us with implementing... before we became a more agile shop these confrontations usually resulted in me having to back down and implement the features because they were pretty much set in stone by the time they got into our queue but now we can often compromise since we're involved earlier in the planning stages.

I wouldn't attribute the change to "agile" ... but would attribute the problem to poor design. Subtle difference, but you get the same garbage in agile stuff - just depends on the PM, really.

No, I don't attribute it to being agile, I attribute it to dev being involved near the start of project planning and having input along the way. It just happened that when the company decided on being an agile shop this happened as well. Sorry that was not clear.

The annoying thing is that these things are often used to stop other developers stealing stuff, like the the disable right click so you can't steal my images.

Someone I know has an old website in flash that he had done that way so people steal the images. When I did a print screen and a 5 second edit in Photoshop he was a little shocked. He's get the site rebuilt in HTML now :)

If it's on the web, then it's gonna get stolen if someone actually wants it. Don't piss everyone else off in the meanwhile.

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