Thread:Extension talk:ParserFunctions/ ifexist shows up as link in WhatLinksHere/reply (4)

Here you go:

We have version 1.1.1 of ParserFunctions. I think the best way to tell you is to give you the entire story. Some our important templates for certain page operations, like merging, splitting, and moving; as well as a few other templates, link to the article's talk page. Many of those talk page's didn't exist, thus flooding our Wanted Pages. So, we used the ifexist function to form the link if the talk page existed, and to display plain text if it did not. We began to notice the Disambiguations special page was showing pages linking to game disambiguation pages when they in fact didn't. We then noticed that the special page indicated had a certain template in it. So I went in the template and reorganized it. The template no longer exhibited problems but I had no idea as to the cause. About a week later, another user noticed that the delete template causing talk pages to show up in the wanted pages even though the links didn't exist. This was a was very similar problem as the last template had. So I examined its code. I then noticed that both templates used the ifexist function. Realization dawned upon me. I went and check every other template that used this function. Every single one was having the exact same problem. We were formating the ifexist function like this:

But that was cause the problem. Our solution for the time being is to format the ifexist function like this:

That's my story. I hope it helps.