Adding books, tags sometimes include a + I never typed

I've been adding more books than usual lately. Sometimes I add them using https://www.librarything.com/addbooks and sometimes using https://www.librarything.com/addnew.php when I do this, I sometimes find that the tags I specify are corrupted. Usually the corruption involves adding a + at the start of the tag - so "non-fiction" becomes "+non-fiction". In one case. where the desired tag had a space in it, a + was also inserted to replace the space: "domestic animals" became "+domestic+animals".

This does not always happen. At one point, I suspected it was somehow happening only when I had copied tags from a different books "edit book" page, rather than retyping them, but that doesn't seem to be consistent in either direction. A recent example is: https://www.librarything.com/work/437746/edit/237031776 - I've already edited it to fix the tags. (Using https://www.librarything.com/work/edit/237031776?referpage=addbooks.php rather than https://www.librarything.com/work/437746/edit/237031776 IIRC, though of course that shouldn't matter.)

This never happens when I add tags from the edit page.

To make things more confusing, I switched browsers and operating systems at about the time this started happening. It is happening on Firefox 111.0 (64-bit) running on Pop!_OS 22.04 (derivative of Ubuntu 22.04, with few changes). It never happened on MacOS using Safari

I'm getting rather sick of regularly going to the tags page to select books with tags beginning with + and fix all their tags to remove the extraneous symbol(s). At least they sort at the beginning of the list.

Note also this prior report, of a bug that's now fixed. Could fixing that have managed to create this new problem? https://www.librarything.com/topic/333870

Thanks for the note. Giving this to @ccatalfo.

@timspalding was able to find some cases here, @ccatalfo's on the fix.

Thank you.

A few days ago this happend to me too.

I also noticed it for the first time after updating Firefox to 111.0 (64-bite) and Mac OS Monterey 12.6.3.

Test 1:
1. Add the tag "Martian Saints
2. Search for "Martian Saints" on British Library
3. It can't find it. Suggests I search for Overcat.
4. Click the link to search Overcat
5. Finds it.
6. Add it.
Bug: Tag added is "Martian+Saints"

Test 2:
1. Search for "Martian Saints" with the tag "Martian Saints"
2. Get results.
3. Click to see next page.
4. Click to add the first item.
Bug: It adds it with the tag "Martian+Saints."

Basically, the LINKS to search are all this way. Next page. Previous page. Search another library. It's double escaping them.

>6 kristilabrie: That would certainly account for it being intermittent, and for me not spotting the trigger. I always search Overcat first, and a lot of the books I've been adding recently aren't there. I eventually find them on some other sources, such as Amazon.

It doesn't account for me sometimes seeing the problem with books added manually. I'll be keeping an eye out for an example of that. (I believe it *has* happened, but no longer remember any specific book. So it's *possible* my memory is at fault.)

Also https://www.librarything.com/topic/350613

Thanks to @lorax and @MarthaJeanne for the bump on this one.

This just happened to me today. This is the first time I've seen this behavior, and the last book I added was just last Friday 5/12. The difference this time was that I searched by ISBN, and when Amazon couldn't find it, I clicked the link to try Amazon UK instead. Then when I went to edit my book, all the tags after the first one began with a "+", and every space in a tag was replaced with "+" as well.

>6 kristilabrie: Bump, new report (closed as dupe) at https://www.librarything.com/topic/355909

Aha, now I found the bug report. Any chance this will ever be fixed?

Thanks for the bump. I'm going to reassign this one to @knerd.knitter who may be able to tackle this, but it's lower priority so I can't promise an immediate timeline. Apologies, and thanks for your patience.

Actually, this may have been an easy fix. Please let me know if it still happens and what steps you took if it does.

I sure will. I added a trial book that wasn't in Overcat and the bug didn't trigger, so maybe we're good now?

This is happening in Tag Watch as well, I have "history of ideas" as a tag watch; it hasn't updated in months. When I click on the tag in one of the results that do show it comes up as "history+of+ideas" with no results.

>16 waitingtoderail: That is a different place, but a related bug; I will fix it.

Going forward, if you can post any other tag encoding url issues here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/367461 it would be helpful.

There are a number of places things like this have been reported, and it would be easier to have them all in one place.

>17 knerd.knitter: thank you!!

Marking this one as fixed, thanks @knerd.knitter! I'll post new iterations of tag encoding URL issues at https://www.librarything.com/topic/367461, as requested.