3) I once again deactivated and activated, and the footer updated.
So this is not an issue now, anyway.
But far more interesting is 2). It turns out that it is not precisely the order of tags that causes them to become duplicated
I tried various combinations of actions with tags and found that a tag becomes duplicated only under the following conditions:
I) A tag (say,
tagx) exists in some thread(s). This tag is contained as "tagx" in
tag_name of
stcp.
IIa) We take another existing thread with some tags imposed and delete
all of them
by either pressing [X] or pressing (Delete all tags). Then we assign a new series of tags to this thread, of which
tagx is
the first.
OR
IIb) We take another
existing thread with
no tags imposed and assign a new series of tags to this thread, of which
tagx is
the first.
In both cases
tagx is entered into
tag_name as "-tagx" (why this happens, I do not know), and thus
tagx appears in
tag_name twice: as "tagx" and as "-tagx", and hence it becomes duplicated in the cloud.
If
tagx is not the first tag in the new sequence of tags, or if the previous sequence of tags was deleted by keyboard actions (not by clicking the hyperlinks), or if not all of the previous tags were deleted - then
tagx does not become duplicated.
Unfortunately, I cannot give you the link to my forum (at present), because it runs in the test mode at the domain closed for public access. However, I can provide any info needed, and screenshots, if necessary. But the sequence above you may easily reproduce by yourself. Hope this helps.
Sadly, I'm not experienced in PHP & SQL
, so I cannot provide insight into the code, only observations on phpmyadmin & forum behavior.