Board Thread:Technical Updates/@comment-26339491-20191203204132/@comment-24155515-20200712062926

Kiwishortcakes wrote: 2nd attempt at commenting. I swear I clicked reply, but my comment didn't appear.

I'm a former anon user who was also experiencing issues viewing images on the site. I didn't think much of it until I was on a page and tried to view a video, only for the page to reload and not show the video at all. It's only until I googled it that I learned that you now need to have an account to view things in the gallery, so I made one. At the very least, it would have been nice to have a banner or something that notifies anons that you now need an account to view the gallery and that the page reloading isn't just a weird glitch. I'm not tech savvy either, so I don't know the tricks to bypass the page reload when viewing the gallery on anon.

Tupka217 wrote: You don't. Accounts are not as useless as you think; for one, they would actually solve your issue. That's a use. It's not useless, but it is a bit annoying. It's yet another account that I have to manage and remember the password of. I don't plan on editing or joining groups or whatever it is that wikis do as a community, so I don't really want an account. It's a bit of a hassle to have to log in per device just so that I could view an image or watch a video in the gallery.

Theoretically, you shouldn't need a workaround to view images and videos inside the lightbox... but if you're in a situation that doesn't load the lightbox for whatever reason (usually a lack of JS support), I'm not sure there is a workaround. I tried playing around with things I thought would force the file page to load instead of the lightbox on a per-image basis along with some other things, and as far as I can tell it's pretty robust and hard to break through without doing the thing the "feature" pushes you to do, make an account.

But there are valid reasons to have an account and to not have (or not log into) them, too.