A character limit of 274 characters has been unexpectedly imposed on group membership requests in Discourse, preventing users from making changes to the text beyond this limit. jtbayly discovered this issue and reported it, noting that the limit does not apply to PMs or saving templates. nat acknowledged the problem, citing recent database changes, and promised to improve error messages. However, jtbayly questioned the explanation, suggesting it might be a frontend issue. Fortunately, JammyDodger announced that the limit has been increased to 5000 characters in the latest update, resolving the issue.
I’m running Discourse 3.0.3, but this also happens on Meta.
I’m not sure when this happened, but it didn’t used to have a limit. We have a long template that we request people fill out for one of our groups. We’ve used it for years. But now when requesting membership, people cannot make any changes to the text in the text box, except to delete text. Once they get below 274 characters, they can add text again.
It’s easy to verify this without a long template, though. Just request membership in a group and try to type more than 274 characters in the membership request field.
On the admin side, I can still save long templates, and on the user side, the whole text still shows up in the text box. But it cannot be used.
Also, there is no warning to the admin or explanation to either the user of what is going on.
Let me just check on the progress. 