bbPress 1 topic titles are limited to 100 chars; no limit on input box when posting topic.

[chriskeeble]

When a new forum post with a title > 100 characters is submitted the user sees a red ”There was an error when creating the topic” message.

Underlying cause is the database field length is max 100 chars.

If the user clicks ’back’, the form is no longer visible – causing frustration (although clicking ’new post’ reveals the form, already populated, in most browsers).

Expected behaviour would be:

a) the input field should have a max length set (to limit input length in the first place)

b) the form submit would fail validation and display the (still populated) form with a validation message (e.g. "Title must be no more than 100 characters")

c) the error message would say what the problem was (title too long) and allow the user to go back and edit. (as a last resort).

In latest version of BuddyPress Test Drive (1.6-bleeding) this is improved: The post no longer fails when title > 100 characters, but now it is trimmed, but with no validation or feedback to the user.

@boonebgeorges ​commented he thinks this is similar but unrelated issue to ticket #4118

[DJPaul]

Can you link to which form on testbp.org you tested this on? Reason is there are two different versions of bbPress on testbp.org.

[chriskeeble]

The tests (which didn't throw an error, but didn't warn the user) are on this forum: ​http://testbp.org/groups/forum-tests/forum/

Let me know if that's not enough info to clarify?

[DJPaul]

That's bbPress 1. Thanks. As you've found, the character limit is in a bbPress table, so we can't change that in BuddyPress. As BuddyPress will be encouraging users to migrate to bbPress 2 in BP 1.6, I don't think it's worth spending a lot of time tweaking the existing behaviour for bbPress 1.

Adding limit to the input box is the simple fix, but I don't yet know how this will affect bbPress 2. We'll wait for bbPress 2 integration to be complete and then revisit this.

[DJPaul]

I've been fixing about this. If anything, we should just set a limit on the input form. Adding a "this topic is too long" message is a much better UI, but our forum forms currently don't send back information on failed topic creation. e.g. write a forum post but leave the title blank, hit submit, and you get an error message -- and you also loose all the content you wrote. I don't think we want to add more cases where this happens until the other issue is addressed (i.e. by bbPress 2).

[boonebgorges]

If anything, we should just set a limit on the input form

Yes, this is probably sufficient. Certainly better than nothing.

[djpaul]

(In [6102]) On the new topic/edit topics templates in BP-Default, set a maxlength on the title input. This prevents titles being silently truncated when over 100 characters.
Fixes #4202