Sorry, if this sounds harsh. But the whole concept of this kind of redirect is fundamentally wrong.
The whole redirection functionality has to be in the main wiki system, not in this plugin and especially not in a redirect table (as file redirect.conf). I first noticed it when I saw that the redirected links are shown as wikilink2 class/attribute (=non-existing page), though they exist as redirection targets. This is already the wrong logic in the first place, because a usual wiki user will not click this kind of link. So the effect is already here that the redirection is "not effective".
I propose that the whole redirection logic is included as a core feature of Dokuwiki. This would be the same as in Mediawiki. I have worked with this for many years. The logic is simple: The redirect is not in a list, which has to be continually edited (and can be edited only by admins - which by the way is an additional flaw of the concept), but it is simply a separate normal wiki page. This page simply has a redirect notice (like "redirect>target_page"). The core system reads this notice and then the same change of page which is now performed in the redirect plugin should be executed.
There are two important benefits of this kind of solution:
- Now we implicitly have also the correct link attribute (wikilink1 = existing page) in the wiki display.
- The redirection pages can be tagged and indexed. The effect is that they now appear in the listings and searchs.