This is a bug I would like someone to try and reproduce on the preview grid, where it won't matter if it happens or not, it's fairly straight-forward, but weird and not very nice when it happens.
Steps to do it:
Take your land and sub-divide it into four or so pieces, two about the same size, one bigger than the others and one smaller. So you might have two 1/4 pieces, and then a 5/8 piece and a 3/8 piece.
Give them all different names and settings.
Take the smallest piece and delete it's name and description (so they're empty).
Now join the smallest piece to the largest piece (in edit terrain select a square of the smallest piece first, then a square of the largest piece and hit join).
Observer results:
All parcel divisions are lost, from 4 parcels instead of being left with 3 (two quarters and a half) you have one big parcel.
Worse still, the settings inherited come from the smallest parcel, meaning you now have a big parcel with no name, no description and no settings.
Expected results:
The smallest parcel should have joined to the largest, and inherited the largest parcel's name and settings.
This happened this morning when I noticed a ton of debris on the land I help manage, so I tidied it up and in doing so found we had a plot of land that wasn't joined to the others. It had no name or description, and wasn't big enough to be for anything (had nothing in it either).
So I joined it to the main parcel, and now we have one massive parcel where before we had a main parcel, a parcel for my shop, a parcel for another's shop and ten parcels for each of our apartments.
Lovely how a simple task I've done millions of times and should be a nice 10 seconds job wrecks all land divisions. When I get back on I'll have to try and reproduce the boundaries for the apartment parcels and figure out which is which so I can set the names correctly. Which will be at least a half-hour job really.
My thinking is that maybe parcel joining chokes on empty names, which is silly, but then parcels shouldn't really have empty names anyway. So if it is a reproduceable bug it ought to be fixed and parcels shouldn't be allowed to have no name
