Q:

How to prevent awesome from changing focus when a mouse click occurs?

I'm using AwesomeWM 4.2 under Xfce4.
I'm using xfpanel.  In rc.lua, I have done the following to prevent the xfpanel getting focus:
-- from https://github.com/zhangkun83/awesome-config/blob/d947e70041fad3e5f34bb832162cacaac62736b1/rc.lua#L492)
{ rule = { type = "dock" },
  properties = {
     border_width = 0,
     titlebars_enabled = false,
 focusable = false
  }},

This works insofar as now, I cannot put the focus on the xfpanel client using keyboard conrtrols.
However, when I click somewhere on the xfpanel (e.g., open the whisker menu, or click on the NetworkManager applet, ...), Awesome makes xfpanel the focused client.
I don't like this behavior because it means I have to explicitly shift focus back to where I was working before.
Is there a way to prevent awesome from changing focus when a mouse click 
occurs?

A:

If you don't want the default settings for docks, make that rule ignore "dock" clients. With this I mean: Find the awful.rules-rule with rule = {}, and change this into rule = {}, except = { type = "dock" },.
Since this default rule sets up button bindings (buttons = clientbuttons), this means that dock-clients will no longer get these button bindings.

