Some "private books" aren't as private as you'd think

I have some books in my "private" collection. Checking my account in another browser where I'm not logged in, they don't show up. All good. However, for some of them, when I go to the book's page in that browser, it shows "recently added by Qualiesin". I thought the whole point was to keep these titles secret from others?

The "private" book feature has never worked properly. The creation of a "private" collection is actually the bug.
You either have a completely private library or completely public. There is no in between.

>2 gilroy: Has there been any attempt made to fix this?

There's a standing bug from 2011. Some work has been done, but otherwise, no.

It's been beta for years. It more or less works for some people. For others it has created real nightmares, like the time one of my books got marked private by accident, and it was so private I couldn't get to it. The biggest fix is that now the link to make a book private is way away from the save button.

Staff have asked in the past for examples where the private info leaks out; so that example you give in >1 Qualiesin: could be potentially fixed, now it has been pointed to via this bug report.

I'm going to ask the developers about this behavior. There is definitely a bug with the inconsistent setting note which I reported at https://www.librarything.com/topic/372005, so we can definitely fix that part.

For developers: I manually added a private book to my library, here: https://www.librarything.com/work/34389876/main

Others can see that I recently added it at https://www.librarything.com/work/34389876/social/289575028 - so, not really that private.

ETA Another page worth noting: https://www.librarything.com/work/34389876/reviews - my review is showing, although I'm guessing my "Your book reviews" setting at https://www.librarything.com/settings/other —set to "non-commercial entities"—is overriding the beta private book feature.

Working on it.

These examples are all fixed. But there are some inconsistencies in the data I need to speak to Lucy about, and there may be other places with problems.