Error message and lost text because of character limit: Add info about this before user post their topic/reply/content?

Related products: CC Product Updates CC Topic Creation

Hello!

Yesterday, I crafted a nice looong reply to a recent product update here in Gainsight community.

When I clicked “send”, my reply text was gone and the error message said: “This value is too long. It should have 50000 characters or less.” I cried a bit internally 😓


My ideas:

  • What about informing the users that their answer will be too long (and gone) BEFORE they hit the send/post/create button?
  • Maybe via a counter similar to the counter in Google Translate?
  • Maybe graying out the send/post/create button if content is too long?

I tried it out in my staging community: Answers in Product updates are limited to 50000 chars, in topics to 30000.

btw: Is there a list somewhere with all character limitations according to content type...?
 

Thanks! 

Additional info:

I just tried to add my newly created reply to the Product Update. According to MS Word, my reply text has 1704 chars (without spaces) and 2032 chars (with spaces). 

But again, there was the message that “This value is too long. It should have 50000 characters or less.”

I had 3 images in my reply, so I wonder if images count as characters or enlarge the text somehow?
 


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