Board Thread:Technical Updates/@comment-26339491-20191203204132/@comment-26339491-20191210045408

Andrewds1021 wrote: To answer my own question, it doesn't look like there is a way for anons by bypass the redirect. At least, there is nothing obvious and the "?redirect=no" that MediaWiki uses for redirect pages also doesn't work. Anons can still, however, access the image on vignette via the same links registered users would.

For those very rare anons that really do want to see the file page, for whatever reason, they can log in. Someone who knows what a file page is and why they need to see it is likely savvy enough to figure that out (and indeed we've not had complaints during the months that we tested this). There is still going to be the odd user who is negatively impacted, by this, yes. That's a price we decided is worth paying in order to get the SEO improvements.

It's entirely possible that there are still bugs to iron out, and the issue with downloaded files that you can't open sounds like one. We'll have to look into this.