Template talk:User

Link to non-existent pages

I'd like to change the template so it only displays links to userpages in case these pages are in existance. In case there is none, then it only displays the name as text. It would decrease the number of ugly red links. Red links are something good for regular articles, since they encourage people to create an article page. For userpages however, they don't have much benefit since each userpage only has one editor: the user (+ helpers, maybe) and the user sees the red link on the upper right corner anyway.
Objections? Lynch ^{(talk|contribs)} 05:12, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

... I don't know, I'm going to need to think about this. It's going to ad a huge overhead to the wiki. This template gets used a lot. -- Strife ^{(talk|contribs)} 23:03, 1 January 2009 (UTC)

I could make you a GM script to do what you want. -- Strife ^{(talk|contribs)} 23:06, 1 January 2009 (UTC)

Hm... Greasemonkey (didn't ever use it before and even had to look up what GM script means ^^) might solve it for myself but not for the wiki.

But you're right that the produced overhead would be unnecessary... When I wrote this, I was only worrying about the changed behaviour and that people might be wondering why the code was 'broken' in some casses (when the link isn't displayed) and didn't think about overhead. I think i'll just make me a second template (User2) and use it exclusivly when people don't have a userpage. That might be the better solution.

Lynch ^{(talk|contribs)} 05:32, 2 January 2009 (UTC)