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We have plans to do more with Bingebot - make definite improvements, add more features, in relatively short order. But I know you'd need to see this happening and won't take my word for it, which is fair, given Fandom's feature release track record in the past. And if this isn't a feature you find particularly exciting, regardless of how we beef it up, that's fair, too. I appreciate your very honest and helpful feedback in any case. 

All good points - I have passed them on.

It's a beta, and we are not where we want to be yet. It creates pretty great recommendations for some - and not-so-great for others. But the more people give input, the better the recommendation algorithm can get, since we collect feedback for the recommendations as well.

Other than further improving the recommendations algorithm, what would you do to make the watchlist a more useful feature?

A number of things don't show when you're on Discussions (like the bottom toolbar and any personal customizations you may have made to your local nav) because Discussions uses slightly different code, even in the nav, where it otherwise looks the same as the wiki side.

We chose the name "watchlist" mostly because that's what many streaming services call the list where you save stuff you might want to watch later - though it does admittedly have the potential to be confused with the MediaWiki watchlist.

There is a watchlist in MediaWiki that lists the pages you follow and where you get notified if someone edits. Bingebot is a completely new feature, still in its beta release, not related to wikis, that also happens to have a watchlist feature. It's the list of shows Bingebot recommend you watch and that you agree you're interested in. Admittedly, it can be confusing that they're called the same and perhaps we need to change something there to make it clearer that one has nothing to do with the other.

If this isn't something you're interested in, you can, of course, totally ignore it.

We are migrating the archived wikis to the UCP as they are, in their archived state. If any of those are corrupted by the migration because broken custom code makes them unreadable, I'm sure we could temporarily re-open them to get that fixed.

We can see changes in SEO rankings overall or per wiki, traffic changes, changes in anon behavior, e.g. do they view fewer pages, edit (even) less, stay on Fandom for a shorter duration of time, all of which would indicate that they're less satisfied with Fandom. Prior to this change, we also looked at how often anons view or edit file pages (that's a ridiculously tiny fraction of visitors). Other than tracking mass trends, we can also track how many bug reports we receive overall and how many reports of a specific issue, although we don't bother with that unless our support team really notices the same thing getting reported multiple times. They haven't really seen this come up.

However, it would be interesting to see those reports by anons who noticed and complained about the change. Do you have links?

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). 

Staff is still following this thread and still reading the new replies - I am in any case. If anything new and relevant comes up, I pass it on to the appropriate team, but I don't typically reply unless I actually have something new to share, or can answer a question. 

In this case, we are aware that people are still concerned about this change and would still like to see more actions taken. We do not think this change was completely without drawbacks, is a perfect solution and that you are all unreasonable for still criticising it. Your points are valid. However, we have a very, very long list of changes large and small that users have requested, many of which we totally agree with - but prioritizing them is always a challenge. An issue has to affect a large enough number of people and/or have enough of a negative impact on people's experience before we can decide to spend resources (i.e. staff time, especially developer time) on it. So far, this one is still relatively low on the list by overall comparison. 

Also note: There will likely be significant changes to Fandom's skin in later phases of the UCP. We don't know what that will look like yet, but it's entirely possible that this problem will resolve itself then. When we redesign our desktop and mobile experience down the road, we may very well be able to give anons better access to file information without losing the SEO benefits we're getting from this. That's another reason why our teams aren't willing to re-open this case right now. 

This has been passed along, too.

Yes, it should. There are still corners on our platform here and there where that has been forgotten, even on the UCP, where old text was just carried over - this is one of them. I'll pass this to the team.

Yes, we also released a fix yesterday for various inconsistencies in rights between the UCP and the old platform. Most of these were only relevant for staff and global volunteer groups, not for admins and communities, but bringing back rollback was on the list.

Noted!

Deeplinks for replies are still coming, so that is known. And in this case, the deeplink functions as an anchor, scrolling you to the intended wall message (thread). It doesn't open a subpage.

If the rights setup is different than on old Fandom, that's likely a bug, not intentional. We'll have to verify this and pass it to our developers.                                                           

It's not a UCP wiki, and yes, that issue is already known. We won't fix it, though, since the problem will go away once all wikis move to the UCP anyway. 

That's definitely a bug, because logging in on mobile should work just like it does on desktop, and no issues are known here currently. What happens when you try to sign in on mobile? If you don't want to share a bunch of details about your browser, etc. you could send a bug report via Special:Contact, where your message is confidential.

A note on why this change doesn't, in fact, negatively affect image rankings:

Image search does not index based on the file page URL; it indexes the image file (.jpg .png, etc.) So if the image is reachable (and it is), it will be discovered and indexed. Ranking is based on the page content. The article page is a significant improvement over a file page in the ranking value for our images because they give context. Google can't "read" images and thus relies on the context around the image as well as file names and meta data. The vast majority of file pages on Fandom do not give that context, while the article pages where images are embedded generally do much better at this.

Since this thread really has become very long and stuff does get buried: Can you summarize the relevant questions you feel still haven't been answered? I may not have answers myself, but I can keep prodding until I find someone who does.

For business reasons, we can't disregard what users want. A platform no one likes using can't make money. But: The users we serve don't all agree on what they want and there are different groups with different needs out there. Only the more involved, editing-focused folks are represented here. And we can only ever deliver a fraction of the things you all ask for, since there are so many more great ideas and suggestions out there than we have the resources to build. It's a tough balance, and we're bound to always disappoint someone.

We can and do want to share the reasons and data decisions are based on. So if you want to start a new thread with remaining questions about forums or their migration to Discussions, you're welcome to. Ping me so I can find answers for it.