Authors profiels with same ammount of spaces between names?

[Empress]

I need to know what I am doing wrong.

Few times it has happened I will copy the name from the authors main page (not from the book edit page), add the additional spaces and ... a new profile is created. Getting the name copied from a book page and replacing the identical name under a book does work. However for authors that don't have their name as primary this is difficult.

So why do I end up with a duplicate profile? Is it because the author would have changed one of the letters to a different alphabet? An A in Roman and an А in Cyrillic look identical but will have a different ascii number.

Here is an example: https://www.goodreads.com/author/simi...

Three Maggie Allen with two spaces (two of them created by me, by changing the name on a single book from one space to two space to three space back to two space).

I don't remember what I did to fix it but I copied the name from somewhere else and again added the two spaces. But I was beginning to feel hopeless I can't assign the book to the profile.

[lethe]

This has only happened to me with accented names. I inadvertently made two new profiles for Gabriel García Márquez, and was told that to prevent this from happening, I should copy the name from the profile page. Which is precisely what you did (and without accents), so it's very odd.

I came across 7 identical profiles a couple of weeks ago and was told that this sometimes happens with imports: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

I don't think this remedy will work in this case because the correct profile is claimed.

Maybe copying from the profile page will work if you first remove the space (MaggieAllen) and then add the necessary spaces?

[Empress]

lethe wrote: "Maybe copying from the profile page will work if you first remove the space (MaggieAllen) and then add the necessary spaces?"

You mean to remove the space save and then correct?

The first time I encountered the above issue was not with a goodreads author. I don't remember if I tried saving the profile without editing, but what worked was copying the name from the first profile.

[lethe]

I'd try first to remove the space and then add the right number of spaces (in case the space on the profile has another ASCII number (well, you never know)).

Only if that doesn't work, remove the space, save and then correct (this will of course create a FirstnameLastname profile, which is preferably avoided).

[Renske]

I think the staff should look at this. We can find ways to solve it, but I think it is strange that it did happen.

[Empress]

lethe wrote: "Only if that doesn't work, remove the space, save and then correct (this will of course create a FirstnameLastname profile, which is preferably avoided). "

But if it is an author profile I can't merge. I can only correct in the book's edit page. Since I am manually adding the spaces anyway I don't think it wold work. But will try it next time.

Renske wrote: "I think the staff should look at this. We can find ways to solve it, but I think it is strange that it did happen."

Thanks, I think so too. I might email them.

[Empress]

Well guys, it seems I've reported this before as well: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

I had completely forgotten.

[lethe]

Ellie [The Empress] wrote: "Well guys, it seems I've reported this before as well: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

I had completely forgotten."

You must have repressed the memory ;)