I somehow broke hiercharial tags

[ownedbycats]

I testing FanFicFare settings and this happened:



I have no idea how the first one escaped being nested, I checked and it starts with [Characters]. like the other two

[Adsenncer]

This usually happens because Calibre treats hierarchical tags strictly based on the exact text format. Even a small difference can cause a tag to appear outside the hierarchy.

A few things to check:

1. Hidden spaces or characters
If the first tag looks like [Characters].Name, make sure there isn’t a hidden space or character before it, such as:

[Characters].Name

[Characters] .Name

[Characters]. Name

Even one extra space will break the hierarchy.

2. Different separator character
Calibre uses the period (.) as the hierarchy separator. If one tag accidentally used another character (like : or -), it won’t nest correctly.

Example of correct format:

[Characters].Harry Potter
[Characters].Hermione Granger

3. Inconsistent capitalization
Hierarchical tags are case-sensitive in some views. For example:

[Characters].Harry
[characters].Ron

These may appear as separate groups.

4. Tag imported differently by FanFicFare
Sometimes the plugin imports tags with slight formatting differences depending on the source site. Running Edit Metadata → Manage Tags and manually correcting the tag format usually fixes it.

Quick Fix:
Open Edit Metadata → Tags, delete the incorrect tag, and re-enter it with the exact same prefix as the others:

[Characters].Name

After refreshing the tag browser, it should nest correctly again.

[ownedbycats]

I figured it out. There was a period in the name. Somehow this broke it