Introducing a 320 Character Limit to Inbox Notes

tl;dr

In a future release of WooCommerce Admin and WooCommerce, we are introducing a 320 character limit to the text content of Inbox notes.

The details

This change, which is currently slated for WooCommerce Admin 3.0 and WooCommerce 6.1, is a part of a design iteration on Inbox notes. The goal of imposing a character limit is to streamline notes’ contents and improve user experience.

The 320 characters are counted based on actual text content that will be rendered, thus HTML tags and their attributes do not add up to the count. For example, observe the following note content:

Hello <a href="https://example.com">World</a>

It will be rendered as the following HTML, and would be counted as 11 characters long since the link tags will not be a part of the final text:

Hello World

Inbox note content which exceeds the limit will be trimmed and appended with an ellipsis.

How can I tell if this affects me?

If you’re using Inbox notes to communicate with your users, you can check if you will be affected by counting the number of characters that your note contains. An easy way to do it is to copy your note displayed in the Homescreen from start to end and paste it into a character calculator tool you can find online.

Additionally, in the upcoming WooCommerce Admin 2.9 and WooCommerce 6.0, a console warning message will appear to let you know if your note is going to be affected. All affected notes’ names will be listed along with the warning.

What action should I take?

We recommend rephrasing your notes’ content in order to not exceed the character limit. If your note supports multiple languages, you’ll need to also ensure all translations adhere to the character limit.