This week I had a fascinating conversation about disabling paste into a text input. You might see this UX pattern when a form requires a user to type “confirm” before taking an action.

I believe it’s a UX anti-pattern. It breaks an expected behavior of a web form without an obvious benefit.

What I learned is that even if it were good practice, you can’t reliably enforce manual typing anyway.

A website can intercept paste events, but that restriction is easy to bypass. A determined user can modify the page’s JavaScript or submit a request directly to the endpoint. The server it can’t reliably establish how it the text was entered.

Requiring confirmation can be useful. Disabling paste adds friction without guaranteeing that someone has paused to consider the action. Leave paste enabled.