Don't limit Topic title to 100 chars

[citizenos]

Don't limit Topic title to 100 chars

[moll]

Would still like this implemented. :)

[tiblu]

@moll Added to the project with a promising name. The thing is, the wish-list will go through review an prioritization at some point upcoming weeks we'll prioritize these and start crunching on the list.

You can always pull request a fix if in a pinch. This issue MAY require some work in Citizen OS FE.

More - if you have some issues that have annoyed you for extended period of time, please add them to Winter Push For Perfection (WPFP) project. I cannot guarantee delivery in that project, but I can guarantee that we will go through them with the project, prioritize them and give feedback on why and where they stand in the list of work.

[moll]

ACK on fixing it myself. I'll ask @infokujur once we've got our instance set up.

Btw, I don't have permissions to move issues to projects.

[tiblu]

@moll OK, I'll review the project permissions and let's fix. Discussion move to Slack.

[tiblu]

@moll Remind me what was your proposal on this?

• Was it to remove the limit and allow whatever length?
• Was it to increase the limit?

[moll]

For all practical purposes, remove the limit. For practical purposes, bump it up to either half or a full thousand to prevent it accidentally including the body entirely.

[tiblu]

@moll We, me and @loorm, had a discussion on the limit. We would like to keep some kind of a limit.
Reasoning being that we need a way to refer to a Topic in a human readable manner in several different places - activity feed, e-mails, topic list on the dashboard etc.
IF we remove the limit, there is no incentive for a person to think of a title, that would be short and descriptive.

What are the practical issues you're having because of the limit?

[moll]

Well, first, that limit has to then be enforced in Etherpad. Hacking off someone's title after signaling that it's perfectly okay to enter it is not a good way to enforce said limit. Secondly, limiting entry and limiting display should not be conflated. There are, albeit rudimentary, ways in CSS to truncate text. E-mails differ in length limits compared to a 3-line square on the home page and may need further truncating anyways.

Rahvaalgatus already has a title limit in the initiative wizard, but Etherpad permits overflowing that anyways. I'm arguing that the backend needs to get out of the truncation game and either start limiting OR let the frontend decide how to handle longer titles.

[tiblu]

It's been a while, this is what we decided to do after discussion with @ilmartyrk and @loorm:

• In this tasks scope:
  • Rise the limit 1000 chars in the DB and in the API code make the limit of title configurable
  • Fix the character counting code so that it counts characters not bytes - https://app.citizenos.com/en/topics/f8f8bea2-362c-46c1-bae5-9d3bf8a83300
• Show a warning to the User about the limit in the Etherpad while editing content - citizenos/citizenos-fe#177