Dave Filchak

Update — we found the actual trigger

We’ve isolated this. The problem is tied specifically to one category: a category named “Downloads” that we created ourselves (not a category that ships by default with the plugin). Any package assigned to that specific category displays another package’s content instead of its own — consistently, reproducibly. When we remove a package from that category, or reassign it to a brand-new category we just created (called “Download”), it immediately displays correctly.

We’ve ruled out our server/database as the cause — MariaDB shows no locks, no stuck transactions, and all tables are InnoDB and healthy (confirmed directly with our host). This is isolated to that one specific category term.

We don’t know whether the “Downloads” term itself became corrupted when we originally created it, or through some other change since — we can’t tell from our side. But the behavior is 100% reproducible: any package in that category shows cross-contaminated content; any package not in that category (including in a freshly created, differently-named category) works correctly.

Given this, we suspect it’s connected to your “Similar Downloads” / related-packages feature, since that’s the part of the plugin that looks up other packages sharing a category — if there’s something off with that specific category’s data (a duplicate term entry, a taxonomy mismatch, or similar), packages in that category could end up cross-referencing each other’s content instead of their own.

Could you check, from your side, whether the “Downloads” category (as it currently exists on our site, if you still have access, or from the description above) shows anything unusual — duplicate term IDs, a taxonomy mismatch, or similar? In the meantime, we have a working workaround (moving everything to a newly created category), so this isn’t urgent for us, but we’d like to understand the actual cause if possible.

Any kind of update at all?

Just a bit more: I see in the download in question, there has been a password set. How would the student actually know this password? Does it get sent out by DLM?