# Group membership requests suddenly limited to 274 characters
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/group-membership-requests-suddenly-limited-to-274-characters/265127
**Category:** Bug
**Created:** [May 16, 2023, 1:20am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/group-membership-requests-suddenly-limited-to-274-characters/265127 "2023-05-16T01:20:06Z")
**Posts on this page:** 6
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@jtbayly](https://meta.discourse.org/u/jtbayly)
#### Post date: [May 16, 2023, 1:20am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/group-membership-requests-suddenly-limited-to-274-characters/265127/1 "2023-05-16T01:20:06Z")
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.
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### Author:  [@nat](https://meta.discourse.org/u/nat)
#### Post date: [May 16, 2023, 3:49am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/group-membership-requests-suddenly-limited-to-274-characters/265127/4 "2023-05-16T03:49:17Z")
We’ve recently added some character limits to our database so that’s probably the problem here.
Totally agree that minimally we should show better errors to the user. We’ll get that lined up.
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### Author:  [@jtbayly](https://meta.discourse.org/u/jtbayly)
#### Post date: [May 19, 2023, 11:21am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/group-membership-requests-suddenly-limited-to-274-characters/265127/9 "2023-05-19T11:21:26Z")
This explanation doesn’t make sense to me.
Submitting the request generates a PM, which does not have a small character limit.
Nor am I prevented from saving the template with a lot of characters.
It feels to me like this is just an erroneous limit applied on the front end.
Fwiw I, I’d like to be able to keep using a long template.
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### Author:  [@JammyDodger](https://meta.discourse.org/u/JammyDodger)
#### Post date: [May 19, 2023, 11:27am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/group-membership-requests-suddenly-limited-to-274-characters/265127/10 "2023-05-19T11:27:51Z")
I believe this is/will be upped to 5000. 👍 Let me just check on the progress. 🙂
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### Author:  [@JammyDodger](https://meta.discourse.org/u/JammyDodger)
#### Post date: [May 24, 2023, 8:48am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/group-membership-requests-suddenly-limited-to-274-characters/265127/13 "2023-05-24T08:48:54Z")
Just to loop back - I believe this should now be a 5000 limit rather than a 274 one, so if you update to Latest you should be good to go. 👍 🙂
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### Author:  [@JammyDodger](https://meta.discourse.org/u/JammyDodger)
#### Post date: [May 27, 2023, 7:00am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/group-membership-requests-suddenly-limited-to-274-characters/265127/14 "2023-05-27T07:00:22Z")
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