maxlength in edit vs add

[EllieMorgan]

Adding a new story has the summary box with maxlength 240 plus multi select to append relevant tags. Editing a description (to, for example, append new tags) has the combined summary+tag field limited to 255, resulting in being unable to update without removing portions of summary (one of my stories has, for example, 130ish chars of tags).

When I say "unable", I mean that bypassing maxlength in edit form submission (attribute deletion on browser end etc) allowed the tags to be edited without impact to summary sentences, so this appears to be a purely front end restriction.

Not sure what my exact suggestion is if it's being stored as one string in the db. Obviously storage changes are a mess; ideally the description could be split to two boxes with individual limits to allow 'normal' tag modification in summary edits, but that could potentially be a not exactly minor change if it's structured as I'm assuming, so I guess I'm just suggesting that you up the maxlength attribute on the edit page and consider a split field in future as a more sweeping solution.

Also kind of curious what would happen if someone deleted the maxlength attribute and really went to town on that box. I don't plan to try it.

Unless I'm completely mistaken and still half-asleep, which is totally possible. In which case carry on.

[DemonGoddess]

the field actually truncates if you exceed the maxlength. So, sure, you can edit it, but if you exceed it, it won't save all your changes.

[EllieMorgan]

Would be easy if it did, but I edited my description to 316 characters last night.

EDIT: To clarify, I didn't muck around with the maxlength in add, so if there are restrictions on that behind the scenes then two thumbs up. But on edit, my original description was 290-something characters (I think), exceeding maxlength, so that's affected by the suggestion to increase it here. But I forced in the new tags and description updates, and it successfully saved with 316 characters (154 summary sentences and the rest tags, so I follow the spirit of the add function if not the edit box). So 255 doesn't appear to be a hard limit for edits. Still, I haven't tested the boundaries of that and don't intend to; hopefully it does truncate before it would become a visual issue in the archive if someone did more. Regardless, I think 255 should be higher because tags.

I'm dodging specifics on exactly what I did because I don't want to encourage everyone and their grandmother to try it out, but if you want a step by step, I can try Skype or something.

Edited December 28, 2015 by EllieMorgan

[DemonGoddess]

The field itself is set to have 240 characters allowed.

[EllieMorgan]

In the add story part, which works well since it's separate from tags. Edit details has a concatenated field, something like:

<input type="text" name="sdescrip" value="$concatenated_descrip_and_tags_string" maxlength="255">

After which forcing the field value to something longer than 255 is still accepted on post. It's this maxlength that could be problematic for editing tags/description in longer or more involved fics.

See the story Depravity in http://games.adult-fanfiction.org/main.php?list=1803for exceeding 255.

I'm not very good at describing this, haha.

[DemonGoddess]

I counted it, and yes, you have 290 total characters for the summary. HOWEVER, last I checked, the field itself was limited. Having said that, this was a number of years ago. Could be that the main tech actually changed the properties of the field as well. Won't know until I look.