Comments field gives no indication of how large a comment may be, and no indication when you've exceeded that limit

Bug #915326 reported by Jeff Lane 
12
This bug affects 2 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Launchpad itself
Triaged
Low
Unassigned

Bug Description

When commenting on a bug, there's a chance that a comment could be rather long. See bug #745470 comments 12 and 13 (note, it's a private bug).

Those comments were supposed to be one comment, however, I finally discovered that I had to break it into two comments to get LP to accept it.

If there are constraints on the amount of characters or words that can go into a comment, that's fine. But the comment box gives absolutely NO indication of a size limit.

Many websites that use these multi-line text boxes provide a warning saying that a maximum of X characters or words are allowed, and many even provide a counter that tells the user they have used Y of Z characters.

Once that limit is reached, the user is either prevented from adding more text, or the counter turns red indicating they've gone over the limit.

With Launchpad, nothing happens. What the user gets instead, is a useless and unfriendly "Error 400" page. It gives NO information other than "Your Broswer made a bad request" which doesn't hit to the user at all that they've actually just typed too much stuff.

So Please add some mechanism for explaining or warning the user that this is happening, rather than simply leaving them confused with strange webserver errors that don't offer any explanation.

Tags: confusing-ui
Revision history for this message
Adolfo Jayme Barrientos (fitojb) wrote :

Yeah, that's annoying. Maybe adding a reverse character counter (like Twitter's) would help?

Changed in launchpad:
status: New → Confirmed
Revision history for this message
Jeff Lane  (bladernr) wrote : Re: [Bug 915326] Re: Comments field gives no indication of how large a comment may be, and no indication when you've exceeded that limit

On 01/12/2012 11:14 AM, Fitoschido wrote:
> Yeah, that's annoying. Maybe adding a reverse character counter (like
> Twitter's) would help?
>
> ** Changed in: launchpad
> Status: New => Confirmed
>

That would be awesome, but even more simply I've seen constraints on
text input boxes where you are simply unable to enter more than X
characters. When I run into those, I immediately start revising, or
figuring out how to split what I'm writing into two parts.

--
Jeff Lane - Hardware Certification Engineer and Test Tools Developer
Ubuntu Ham: W4KDH
Freenode IRC: bladernr or bladernr_
gpg: 1024D/3A14B2DD 8C88 B076 0DD7 B404 1417 C466 4ABD 3635 3A14 B2DD

tags: added: confusing-ui
Aaron Bentley (abentley)
Changed in launchpad:
status: Confirmed → Triaged
importance: Undecided → Low
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