Ah. Found what happened.
Sometimes if there’s a tag with an alias, such as
Puppy
-> Dog
And someone aliases both of those to a new, third tag, thus:
Puppy
-> Canine
Dog
-> Canine
Then the Puppy
-> Dog
alias remains but is not visible in the normal public view of the tag and only shows up if you edit the tags.
This is an easy mistake to make, because the UI for aliasing looks like it is offering to EDIT the alias. So if you ‘edit’ the existing Puppy
-> Dog
alias to Puppy
-> Canine
then Philomena creates a new link leaving the old one in place.
So you end up with aliases that have aliases, and … well, on BoR this was a horrific situation with infinite loops, but Philomena seems to be ok with it. Although I’m not sure what would happen if a tag had to be aliased in one of these weird cases.
For anyone else working with Philomena, the current solution is to first
- open all tag aliases on a tag
- Remove all of the aliases
- re-add new aliases from scratch.
Again thank you for reporting these, I’ll keep working on fixing them.