Liquid vents stop outputting when they are covered by liquid (specifically, when the mass of liquid in their cell is too high). I often use this fact to passively limit the amount of water sent to a room (for instance, an algae farm).
And then there's this case...
I've discovered that liquid vents can output an infinite amount of water in one specific circumstance. If the liquid vent is covered by a "blob" of liquid other than the one that's trying to exit the vent, and there isn't enough mass of that liquid to prevent them from outputting, they will still output. If the blob cannot move (for instance, because it is heavier than the liquid exiting, and at the bottom of the room), the exiting liquid will "squirt" around it, potentially causing an infinite egress from the pipe network.
More concretely: I built an algae farm, using a liquid vent to passively push back on the water supply when the farm filled. Through some chain of events, I ended up with something like 500 g of Polluted Water in this farm. The pressure of the normal Water filling the rest of the farm forced this PW to sit on top of the vent, which was in the lower left corner. But as long as the PW was on top of the vent, more Water kept exiting the vent: instead of displacing the PW, it just "squirted" around it into surrounding tiles, until it overflowed out the top of the farm. This is counterintuitive, frustrating (the game's affordances clearly support using vents in this way), and I can't believe it's intended behavior.
(1) Build a liquid vent in a reservoir (2) Cover it with a small amount of Polluted Water (say, 500g per tile) (3) Pump Water into it
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