Have you ever been editing a product description, or a category title in Zen-Cart and had the field go blank?
Since updating a bunch of older 1.2.x stores to 1.3.x, I have -- and customers don't like data entry at the best of times, let alone when you have to tell them to edit it down to less than 200 characters and try inputting all again, rather than just editing out the excess characters.
So i've spent the day tracking down a solution, which happens to be via the javascript counters for the various products.
If we look at /includes/modules/pages/product_info/jscript_textarea_counter.js
Line 8-10 states:
if (excesschars > 0) {
field.value = field.value.substring(0, excesschars);
alert("Error:\n\n- You are only allowed to enter up to"+maxchars+" characters.");
If you change that to read:
if (excesschars > 0) {
field.value = field.value.substring(0, maxchars);
alert("Error:\n\n- You are only allowed to enter up to"+maxchars+" characters.");
You'll find you get the error, rather than the field going blank -- because it gives the user the ability to then edit what they've typed, it's a much better solution to the problem.
note: If you use "Free Shipping" for any of your products, you should also apply this fix to the /includes/modules/pages/product_free_shipping_info/jscript_textarea_counter.js file (the files are identical).
