Possible bug?
 

Bear with me for a moment while I explain exactly what I did:

In the World Almanac, under Places, I created a political region called North America. I created other political regions and set North America as their container, then I created some communities and set their container to be the sub-regions of North America. Then I realized that the regions had tags. And the region type with the "continent" tag was "geographical".

I moved North America to the Story Almanac (along with the child topics) so it would be isolated. I created a new Geographical Region called North America. I broke the links for all the topics that were governed directly by North America (I didn't do anything with the communities that were governed by the sub-regions). Then, for each topic, I selected the new North America as the container.

I copied and pasted all the snippets from the old North America to the new North America. Then I deleted the old North America. At this point, I got a message saying that the old North America was a linked topic, and the link would not be converted to plain text.

I found the snippet in question, the one that contained the link. I highlighted the entire snippet and told it to clear the links and rescan.

It said no new links were found.

Then I highlighted "North America" and selected the option to create a manual link. That listed all the topics except the new North America.

I moved the new North America back to the World Almanac. No change.
I closed and restarted Realm Works. No change.

I'm about to sync all my changes, and if that works, then I'm fine. But if I don't maintain cloud service, or even if I do and someone else who doesn't runs into this, just thought you'd want to know.

Of course, I could be missing something simple as well. That's been known to happen . . . maybe . . . once . . . or twice . . . *ahem*

Syncing did not help.

This sounds very odd. It may very well be a bug. At the very least, it's not something I can diagnose from what you outlined here. I recommend submitting it as a bug report, then a member of the dev team can follow up with you and get to the bottom of exactly what's going sideways.

FYI, you can also duplicate a topic to a new category if you want. Or you can completely move a topic to a new category. Everything that's the same between the original and new category is migrated cleanly. Everything else is brought across as best as possible. You can find both these options under the Tools/Options menu within the header region for the topic (also accessible via <F7>).

I filed a bug report, but it's a non-issue. There was something I was missing. A snippet won't link to it's own topic. Now that I realize that's what the issue was, I'm assuming that was by design.

But then there's the question of how it got linked it the first place . . . which it was, because it warned me about removing the link. That's what has me confused now.

When you saved the new North America article, it had "North America" in the text and linked it to the old North America article. You tried to delete and got the error. Then you cleared the link, deleted the old, and tried to link it to itself in the confusion.

Sound about right?

Well, possibly, possibly not.

Possibly not because I haven't seen links dynamically update, and I didn't manually update any before deleting the old North America.

Possibly because, hey, I'm human. My memory and I are both prone to errors. Anywhere I can file a bug report for my brain?

OK, now that I've thought about it, that must have been what happened. It all fits perfectly.