Suggested work combinations oddity

The Editions page for Black Ships Before Troy by Rosemary Sutcliff has a bizarrely long list of potential work combinations, most of which appear completely random:
https://www.librarything.com/work/209527/editions/161187552

I can't see anything obvious (like a bad existing combination) that might have caused this.

There's a whole bunch of suggestions at the end that start with a bracket AND a parenthesis, I wonder if that has something to do with it? One edition of Black Ships starts with a bracket and a parenthesis.

I bet that's it. I checked a couple of the suggestions and saw bracket-parenthesis editions there too.

>2 norabelle414: and >3 lorax: Yep, that seems to be the culprit. I'm not sure what we can do to fix it, but I'll look into it.

My guess would be that the open parenthesis signals the end of a book title, the same way a colon does, and so the system reads all of those books as having just an open bracket as their title.

The question is - has this been happening all along and we didn't notice, or has it just started recently and if so, why?

I checked out a few copies to see if maybe they were all from the same user but it's quite the opposite - most users who have a bracket-parenthesis edition have only one, occasionally 2 or 3. They do all seem to be imported from Amazon (unsurprising, IMO).

>5 norabelle414: Bingo. Have to go to the DB!

Well, now I'm not so sure. This one is on the list, and it does not have a bracket or parenthesis.
https://www.librarything.com/work/22258388/editions

So maybe it's just titles with "author" in them, and the bracket-parenthesis format is just how some things are getting imported from Amazon lately.

Any news on this? the list keeps getting longer

This book has a different but equally long list of suggestions, with the common word in this case being "untitled"
http://www.librarything.com/work/9960847/editions

bump, see https://www.librarything.com/topic/302439

bump

bump
https://www.librarything.com/work/4979986/editions/72740817

The Hunger Games is suggested to be combined with tons of other books with authors named Collins.

Bump
There's a huge and varied list of suggestions at https://www.librarything.com/work/126495/editions
Lots that start with a bracket and parenthesis, but also lots others.

>13 r.orrison: ew

It would be really good to be able to dismiss bad suggestions, although on a page like that one it would be a lot of work.

Bump

Bump - this has been suggested as a possible cause of a memory bug, reported in https://www.librarything.com/topic/332258.

I think it's a combination of 2 very common "combine potential" issues that mess a lot of pages up: ratty Amazon data (Titles like: SOS-Title unknown), and also titles in "foreign characters" (for example in Japanese or Russian - sorry, I can't remember the correct expression at the moment).

The list just kept getting longer and longer!

An almost endless list of potential combinations is common on popular works and the ability to dismiss them permanently as with author combinations would be welcome and helpful.

Another example: https://www.librarything.com/work/10230601/editions

Bump: https://www.librarything.com/topic/336315

Bump: https://www.librarything.com/topic/346060

Bump: https://www.librarything.com/topic/346307

Thanks for the bump!

Fixed. It's part of a larger work-confusion issue I'm working on. This is fixed for now.

>25 timspalding: I'm still seeing hundreds of suggested work combinations:
https://www.librarything.com/work/209527/editions
https://www.librarything.com/work/10230601/editions
https://www.librarything.com/work/126495/editions

>26 norabelle414:, I see 0 suggested work combos on the first two links, and I see 3 suggested work combos on the last link

>27 lemontwist: Oh good! I'm seeing the same now. Must have been a caching issue.

Marking as fixed.