Template talk:CBSB link

"Excessive use" category

@Anomie: The current tracking category logic doesn't seem well-designed. With the current logic:

• A page with title of the form "YEAR TEAM baseball team" is placed into the category only if the "if exists" logic succeeds.
• Tracking is turned off if |cat=no.
• The tracking category is currently empty.

The purpose of the tracking category is ambiguous:

1. The goal may have been to eventually eliminate the expensive existence check for "YEAR TEAM baseball team" if it is never used. But the |cat=no escape hatch means we don't know whether that check ever really succeeds.
2. The goal may have been to discourage editors from using expensive existence checks, by forcing them to say |cat=no to avoid a tracking cat? The existence check for "YEAR TEAM baseball team" happens regardless of whether that page exists or not, so the current logic does not actually reduce expensive checks.

At the very least, I think we should remove {{#ifeq:{{{cat|}}}|no from the tracking, and if the check truly never succeeds, we can remove the "YEAR TEAM baseball team" check and save an expensive check. But if no active editor understands why the tracking logic is the way it is, I would suggest removing the tracking entirely.

What do other editors think? — hike395 (talk) 15:40, 25 November 2025 (UTC)

Pinging @Billcasey905 the original author of the template. — hike395 (talk) 15:41, 25 November 2025 (UTC)

Later: I unified the implementation of {{CBSB link}} and {{cfb link}} because they do almost exactly the same things (except for "football" instead of "baseball", and a differently named tracking cat). The question of what to do about the tracking logic applies to both templates. — hike395 (talk) 20:55, 25 November 2025 (UTC)

@Hike395: The tracking category is empty because AnomieBOT replaces the unnecessary instances of the template once a page shows up in the category. It does this for Category:Excessive uses of cbb link, Category:Excessive uses of cfb link, and Category:Excessive uses of csb link as well. Apparently I forgot to ever add Category:Excessive uses of cih link to the bot back in 2013; I'll fix that now. As for the |cat=no, many templates include such things for demo usages or the like, but they're usually not intended for general use. Anomie⚔ 22:45, 25 November 2025 (UTC)

@Anomie: Does AnomieBOT only handle cases where the template is called with concrete arguments? In other words, does it only handle cases like

{{cfb link|year=2008|team=Utah Utes}}

or does it do something with

{{cfb link|year={{{year|}}}|team={{{team|}}}}}

? I'm asking, because I'm trying to understand if there is a way to remove the (practically) never-used "YEAR TEAM SPORT team" expensive existence test, which causes problems on pages like 1960 college football season (which runs out of expensive calls about halfway down the list). — hike395 (talk) 23:16, 25 November 2025 (UTC)

It looks for invocations of the template, calculates the link for the case when the category is added, and replaces the template with the corresponding plain link if that page exists. If it saw {{cfb link|year={{{year|}}}|team={{{team|}}}}}, it would check for a page named "{{{year|}}} {{{team|}}} football team" and fail to find it because that's an invalid title. I also note that passing an empty value for parameters year or team is probably invalid in the first place, since the whole point of the template is to generate a link including a year and team; if you don't want those, you probably should be linking directly instead of using the template in the first place. Anomie⚔ 23:32, 25 November 2025 (UTC)