Manually adding book with strange results

Added a book manually and was then surprised, after saving, to find that instead of 1 copy there are 886. This is what it ended up pointing to:

https://www.librarything.com/work/390213/edit/229626196

Why does this happen ? How to fix it ? Does it have anything to do with the title being in a different alphabet (Hebrew) ? Decided to try that anyway as a test. It seemed to work except for the weirdness noted.

Thanks

>1 cns1000: Added a book manually and was then surprised, after saving, to find that instead of 1 copy there are 886.

This is a feature, not a bug, except that this time it didn't work. :-)

When you manually enter a book, LT tries to find other versions of the book and combine them. This is very useful when dealing with books that have no ISBN. It has saved me a lot of work combining items. But, in your case, it combined your book, by Rabbi Moses GREENFIELD, with Honey, I Love and Other Love Poems by Eloise GREENFIELD. (Note the last names.)

Just go ahead and split the book. It was a combination glitch.

Ah, I see! Thanks for the help.

"This is a feature, not a bug, except that this time it didn't work."

That's up there with the best responses of developers to bug reports. The one that always made me laugh was "That's not a bug. It's just a feature that's failed far earlier than we anticipated."

There was a work titled just "Green Field" with no author name also combined on there. I have separated that, and it looks like that was to blame for your book being pulled in, because on the editions page it has now stopped suggesting your book is the same as "Honey, I Love...", but still offers this "Green Field" as a suggestion.

(Edit: Closed as not a bug...I think, but do feel free to reopen if there is opinion that a bug is involved)

>4 RobertDay: That's up there with the best responses of developers to bug reports. The one that always made me laugh was "That's not a bug. It's just a feature that's failed far earlier than we anticipated."

I'm not LT staff, so I'm not trying to defend my work. :-) (Though I do have a programming background, so I understand the problems they face.)

This is a useful feature, in that it saves a lot of people from having to do book combinations -- important, because creating book combinations is not obvious at all. The problem is, the guess-at-combinations algorithm has to guess based on sometimes-inadequate data. This seems to have been a particularly bad guess, but even here, you can see part of the thinking. (Same author last name, and the Hebrew book was by an author with no other books listed.) As someone who has to do a lot of manual entries, I'm very glad for this feature even if I sometimes find that it really messes up.