Board Thread:Technical Updates/@comment-26339491-20191203204132/@comment-5288784-20200215232437

It can be disappointing to have your favorite being taken away from you, being locked behind a registration or upgrade wall or being removed altogether. But we also need to understand the other side. Maintaining any feature has a cost, whether it's a man-hour cost, or (like in this case) "lost opportunity" cost.

When this feature is only used by a very small number of people, the devs sometimes come to the conclusion that maintaining it is too costly in relation to its popularity. Unfortunately, there is very little that can be done about such situations than to somehow adapt to it.

An average unregistered person will not notice much difference. They may need maybe one or two images from a specific page, but might not be intimately familiar with a standard MW wiki. The least tech-savvy people are likely to just download a tiny thumbnail. Moderately capable will open a popup window first, then download a larger version. And the most observant will notice the link to the fullsize version in that popup.

Yes, I know some day I might be the one who gets the short end of the stick. All I can say is: that's how it works.