We have two systems, System A imports a list of sports events from system B, it only wants to import the events we will be providing live data for, the filter used to hide events that we are not providing data for is if the event has a referee assigned to it.
The problem with this is that we don’t know who the referee will be for particular events but we know there will be one so someone has created a referee with the name TBC and assigned it to a bunch of events so they will get imported.
Now there is a request to be able to mass assign this TBC referee to multiple events to save our operations staff from having to manually assign the referee for each event one by one.
This to me seems like a very bad idea, I don’t like the idea of a referee called TBC in the first place but i can’t really explain why, just seems like an anti pattern to me.
Can someone help me out and explain if it is a bad idea or not and why ?