[ownedbycats]

I came across a weird corner case and am trying to figure out what happened.

Short version: The HTML longtext column had a secondary series with a glitchy name, missing index, and the same seriesURL as the primary. This disappeared upon updating from website.

Long version:

I ran an Update Metadata from Column on an AO3 fic. The series changed to one with a kind of glitchy looking name that looked like a regex gone wrong.

In the long metadata column the glitchy name was listed as a secondary series. However, the seriesURL was the same as the first series and the index was missing (there was a stray '[' at the end).

The glitch series wasn't present on the site and Update Metadata removed it from the longtext column.

Any thought of what might have happened here? My best guess is that something went wrong (a transient site glitch?) when scraping the metadata the first time.