Last modified: 2011-03-13 18:05:58 UTC
Currently, links to pages that are redirects to the current page show as normal links. For instance, [[seizure]] has a link to [[grand mal seizure]] which is in turn a link to [[seizure]]. A user clicking this will expect to find a new page on grand mal seizures but will instead be redirected to [[seizure]]. Links to this type of redirect should have the same appearance as links from a page to itself (bold, with no <a href>), or as links to nonexistent pages (red).
I think if this were implemented, such links would have to be marked either as self-links, or with some new styling - a red link suggests that you'll reach an edit page, which is even further from the truth. I rather suspect, however, that this would prove rather expensive to check for every link in a page - especially when you consider that it would require the cache to be invalidated of any page pointing to a redirect that was editted, in case links had been turned into self-links of this sort. Brain-storming, one way of making it less costly might be that if we had a links table with an is_redirect flag (something I've been considering proposing for other reasons), a list could be composed in one query of "pages that redirect here". That way, links would only have to be checked against that list, rather than against their database entries. Similarly, the caching issue could be minimised by knowing that (e.g.) page_a was the old target of th redirect, and page_b was the new one, and therefore only those need be purged from the cache...
This would make it unreasonably difficult to follow the link to get to the redirect page and fix it.
*** Bug 9179 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 3897 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
The links could be given the selflink class (or whatever it's called) but still be functioning links, I suppose. I'd imagine that extra queries when rendering would be a better reason to reject this, no? Or is that not a problem?
