John of Reading, I am not familiar with the POTD process for the main page, but I think I have pieced it together. please tell me if I am correct. it looks like the bot used {{subst:#invoke:POTD titletext|main|2020-07-20}} (not sure exactly of the process) to create the link text in Template:POTD protected/2020-07-22 and that added |alt1= and |alt2= due to failure of this module to correctly parse the title information? and this error was subsequently corrected here? I was able debug the issue since {{subst:#invoke:POTD titletext|main|2020-07-20}} is still showing the problem and I have updated the code. the new version leverages the backend substitution process to isolate the titletext, instead of using the fragile regular expression. if it fails, it will return either ? or ?? depending on where it fails in the process, but I tested it on the next 10 POTD and it is working for those, so I believe it's fixed now. Frietjes (talk) 14:53, 22 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]