Board Thread:Technical Updates/@comment-26339491-20191203204132/@comment-5288784-20200217124944

But then if they do want to get that full-sized version, they don't get the original image - they get a crappy compressed webp file that they can't use anywhere else instead, because it thinks it's a jpg/png instead.

I couldn't replicate this bug today. I went on Chrome to an article on my wiki, downloaded a couple of files to my computer (using various methods available to anonymous users), and reuploaded to my test wiki. Absolutely no issues. Both the default Windows 10 image viewer and Open Office Draw were able to open them, too. I'm not an expert enough to verify the level of compression, unfortunately.

As others have mentioned, there are plenty of ways to effect this change purely for web crawlers without disrupting the anonymous experience. And you all might be right. I'm not a SEO expert though, and so I am unable to verify whether those solutions would indeed work. My post was about the phenomenon of limiting some features to certain users or completely removing them. Note that this is not the first time in the history of this platform that cost/popularity ratio was the deciding factor. Notable example: Monobook.

At the wiki I'm most active on, editors have spent a considerable amount of time building up a large repertoire of photos. Now getting to these photos is a nightmare. We used file pages to help boost the SEO of these images on their own - now all that work has just been thrown down the drain. Not to mention image categories, which are absolutely impossible to access now without links in the main namespace. I admire the dedication of your community. Unfortunately, the thing I've noticed a while ago is that Fandom wikis are not built to act as Web 2.0 image repositories. They are fine for illustrations of articles maybe. A booru might be a better option.

In anything, what should have been done is just improving the file pages themselves. Make them more appealing to crawlers. Encourage editors to complete file descriptions. I'm all for SEO and trying to improve it, but is making things better by just throwing out the bad bits really the right move? Or should those weak spots be improved or strengthened? Not every wiki community, even if we only include those about popular topics, is able to do something that. Their resources might already be stretched thin.