It only recently came to my attention that such a thing as middle clicking on a mouse even exists
. Maybe it's a good job I am passing development over to more capable hands! Anyway, it turns out some people like to middle click buttons rather than left click as normal, because middle clicking always opens a new window or tab. The problem though is that this technology has a really crappy design (technical term). When you click on a button, you are calling up an action of some sort BUT programs often do validation, warnings, confirmation dialogues, prep work etc first before going on to the action. This is to avoid you going into an action with bum data or by mistake or without realizing the consequences, or maybe to optimize the action when it takes place. Turns out the people who designed middle clicking thought it would be really cool just to go straight to the action without doing any of the other stuff carefully put in place by the programmers
One example (the one that triggered this post) is when you click Join to join a game. Because people used to get upset when they accidentally hit the wrong Join button on the list of games and ended up taking over a 1 centre surrendered country by mistake, we put a confirmation dialogue in warning you that you were about to join a game as a surrendered country and asking if you want to continue. But of course if you middle click instead of left click, you wont get any warning. There are many other places where the code tries to help you or make things better triggered by the click which will be bypassed if you middle click. Indeed, there are even places where the code simply wont work - middle clicking on a box in the Orders dialog for example.
Without going through the entire codebase, we can't anticipate where this may affect you or how. Create game, searching for games, buying credits, etc all could be affected.
What quite a few websites do to avoid the issue is they disable middle clicking so it does not do anything. We are reluctant to do that because some people may be happy to take the risks given they like the facility to always open a new window. What we (ie Nopunin10did
) may do is try to go through the buttons that are affected and just disable middle clicking for them. However the key point of this post is to warn you that if you want to middle click, you need to be aware you are flying blind; it will probably work, but you wont get any warnings or validation or optimization, and in some cases it is possible it wont work. One where it wont work that just popped into my mind is trying to create a 2-player challenge game which I think will fail.
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