User story
- Make sure you’re not logged in.
- Go to a talk page on a wiki where the New Topic Tool is enabled by default. E.g. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Talk_pages_project/Usability
- Try to start a new topic.
- Realize that you need some feature from the wikitext that’s not (yet) available in DiscussionTools. E.g. the special character inserter, or a gadget enabled by default on the given wiki that doesn’t support DT.
- Try to get to the legacy full-page editor in all possible ways (looking for a link within the New Discussion Tool, Ctrl+clicking on the new topic tab etc.).
- Realize that the New Discussion Tool always kicks in, no matter how hard you try.
- Give up. 🙁
Feature summary
There should be a way to force using the legacy full-page editor without logging in or manually editing the URL to include a parameter users probably won’t know about in the first place. Since unlike in T293962, anonymous users won’t be able to dismiss it using a preference, it should probably be less prominent, maybe a link in the footer (pointing to &dtenable=0, similarly to T293962, but without the edit notice) could suffice.
Use cases
- Special character insertion until T249072 is done.
- Any local default gadgets or user scripts (the ones that are provided by browser extensions like GreaseMonkey, not MediaWiki’s user scripts, as those aren’t available for logged-out users).
Benefits
Users don’t need to find out and remember the URL parameter. In some exotic browsers or browser-like contexts (e.g. WebView) it may not even be possible to manually edit the URL.
Credits
Inspired by mw:Topic:X2oj786a8zsko63j, where I tried to explain the poster how they can work around T293962 – currently they should either log in, or use a third-party tool, neither of which is a nice solution, even as a workaround.