Board Thread:Technical Updates/@comment-26339491-20191203204132/@comment-26339491-20200721040902

Chunkycheesejr wrote: awful idea. i shouldnt have to login to view/download images that don't belong to wikia(fandom now) (eg game,comic, book art etc.) Its not your created content to restrict. Anons can both view and download images. Intermittently, downloading an image can lead to a non-usable file, but that's a bug that's independent from the anon redirect change which was the original topic of this thread.

We have so far not seen anything in our data that wound indicate this change having any negative consequences on traffic or SEO rankings or even general user satisfaction. Yes, there is a minuscule percentage of users who do not want to log in and who are negatively impacted by the file pages redirect. The vast, vast majority will never notice, or care, however, and communities overall benefit from increased visibilty of their pages on Google (or other search engine results pages).