Forum:Final Fantasy link template

Forums: Index > Rin's Travel Agency > Archive > Final Fantasy link template

I already know that "[[Sector 5 Slum (Final Fantasy VII field)|]]" creates a link that links to Sector 5 Slum (Final Fantasy VII field) and displays "Sector 5 Slum". I still want to add a link template that lets me do the same thing by typing "{{ff|Sector 5 Slum|VII field}}". This template would let editors type the shorter "ff" instead of "Final Fantasy". Additionally, it would not automatically get replaced with "[[Sector 5 Slum (Final Fantasy VII field)|Sector 5 Slum]]" when saving an edit, so using the template would make pages slightly smaller. an_awsome_person (talk, contribs) 23:44, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

While you can do such a thing by editing Template:ff, I'm concerned about some technical issues:

• I'm not quite sure how it would work. What would happen for the pages with tags that aren't of the form "(Final Fantasy [roman numeral] [type])"?
• When one renames a page, they have to (either by hand or by using Intangir Bot) go through all the pages that link to that page and search for every possible way that a link to X could be constructed. Every link template makes this process more complicated: this is why our only link templates used in practice are {{LA}} and {{SL}}.
• It would not make the page shorter except in the most superficial sense that the number of wikitext bytes would decrease slightly. For example this would not affect load time meaningfully.

Anyways, I'm not opposed to such a template (though it should probably be called {{FFL}} or something like that), and users tend to be free to make whatever templates they need for their work, but you should be aware of the technical complications. Cat (meow ∙ hunt) 23:59, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

It actually would affect load times: negatively. This increases the amount of work the template parser does by increasing the number of templates it has to parse. Pages also have a limit of how many templates that can be used, and proliferating a template like this would waste that limit. Given that a template like this exists purely for editor convenience, I do not think it is a good use of resources.

I am opposed to this template, for the same reason I think {{w}} and the like should be phased out and only used for substitution. It adds to the template limit, screws over portability, and has no reader benefit.

If we wanted to create it solely as a substitute template, Module:Codename/data already includes the tag for each game, so it wouldn't be too hard.-- Technobliterator ^T_C 14:13, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

Do we actually have data on how much {{w}} actually affects load times, especially when compared to our (much more complicated and Lua script-dependent) templates? Worrying about the load time on that template specifically just seems like overoptimization. Cat (meow ∙ hunt) 15:04, 11 January 2022 (UTC)