When I add an attachment and then link to the page using attachment:file.dat the users get confused when they are taken to the attachment page and have to click on download.
Observation
Users clicks on link and are taken to the attachment page and then have to click download
Users clicks on link and they download the attachment
Task
Users want to download attachment
Users
Engineers and Scientist
Context
Observation: I get a call when our users can't figure out why it did not download the file when they click on an attachment and instead they get a list of the attachments.
MoinMoin Version: 1.7.2
Browsers: IE 7 and Firefox 3
Discussion
This is known. If you users had used an older moin before, they are used to immediately starting downloads when they click on an attachment item link.
This change was done for convergence to how moin will work in the future. Admittedly, the 1.8 "download page" is not extremely useful, most people see it as just one more click needed to do what they wanted. But in future, attachments will be unified with pages to items and handled mostly in the same way everywhere. Thus, for every link to an item (either page or attachment), we need to link to the "show" action (you don't want to download the raw wiki page source by default either, you want to show it).
There is a longer post from me about this on the mailing list and there is also a longer wiki page here about it, see UnifyPagesAndAttachments and its discussion subpage.
Why do we believe the users failed in the task?
Because they were not expecting to get redirected to the attachment page
How to prevent this failure?
This is a direct download link:
[[attachment:foo.pdf|foo pdf|&do=get]]