HTTP 422 when moving topics with invalid title length

I’m moving a lot of topics from one category to another and some of them simply won’t move. I’m getting an error modal with

422 No Reason Phrase

in those cases.

I’ve investigated the error log and it seems that the title is too short for those topics. Could this be given as reason instead of the more generic text?

Also, enforcing min topic length when moving topics seems not necessary.

How did the topics get created with invalid titles in the first place?

I’ve imported them from IPB, where I didn’t have such a strict rule about topic length.

Even without importing, I can change min topic length from 15 to, e.g., 20 in Discourse and create invalid titles. Those topics then show the same issue if they fail to conform to the new rule.

I think when renaming topics, the rule should be enforced. After I’ve discovered what was causing the HTTP error, I now quickly change the setting, move the topic and revert the settings change.

If you’re curious about why I not simply refine the topic title to something longer: those topics are quite old, and I don’t want to make them reappear under latest. Just move them to where they now belong.

So change the minimum title length, then move them. Problem solved.

Sure, this is what I’m doing:

This was added as a side-note to my initial report. The more relevant part is:

Instead of

422 No Reason Phrase

something like

422 Title too short (min length is X characters)

What do you think about a more verbose message to the user?

5 Likes