long messages get converted to html type and this is problematic

[adbenitez]

the "show more" for long messages is a well known annoyance, it is implemented as a hack using the HTML mail message type, and this is bad, there is no way to know if message was a long message or actually an HTML message, the problem with editing is also there (see #6561)

I think it is better to remove that behavior from core and instead do the truncation+show-more in the UI

that will allow editing long messages and solve the copying text problem

I have received several reports from people complaining they can't edit long messages

another related problem I noticed with incoming messages: a short message can be edited and then become pretty long, then core will not do the "show more" behavior and instead will at some point truncate the message with [...] without possibility to see the full message, this is affecting the "voice to text" bot that starts transcribing voice messages and sends the transcription progressively updating/editing the message instead of having to wait for the full transcription to finish to send then the full message

[r10s]

i agree, that core should not do anything about that, so the actionable item here is quite clear.

instead do the truncation+show-more in the UI

allowing arbitrary long messages is questionable in general. eg. ppl may copy+paste a whole book; even if desktop can manage to edit the 500K in the input field, this may fail on android, the more on older ones.

so we may want to agree on an upper limit in general first, if that limit then requires a show more or not depends on the system.

i think, the gist is that it should be fine for entering quite some text, maybe the double as of now, but copy+paste huge text is another thing.

so, we might still want an upper limit, however, if that is reached, message shall not be sent at all, and it is up to the UI to do smth about that before.

did someone check if/which upper limit other messengers have?

[Simon-Laux]

One issue in the past was that iOS message list began lagging when you had a too long message, IIRC that's why we introduced the linebreak-aware truncating of the messages #3480, deltachat/deltachat-ios#1634.
So this is likely not only about character count, but also about line breaks and text arrangement.

[adbenitez]

so we may want to agree on an upper limit in general first

I don't think that is necessary for now, the system clipboard itself is the bottleneck there

allowing arbitrary long messages is questionable in general. eg. ppl may copy+paste a whole book;

this is a bit out of the concrete issue at hand here, I think it is better to keep the topic of "how long is the maximum text we want to allow" out of this issue, this issue is about truncating the message bubble, despite the text limit we choose, if we choose one for messages in general, the limit will be higher than what we can show in a message bubble and then you need the "show more" button, that is the topic here, not how long such long messages are allowed to be, but how to proceed on displaying them in the message bubble + "show more" (and I guess the reason you bring the limit up is not because you are considering just allow super short messages and remove the "show more" completely, right?)

[adbenitez]

I think for the UIs it would be easier if core just implements this truncation in a better way without using the hack of converting the message to a message with HTML part, for example:

• having dcMsg.isLongText() that allows to differentiate from an HTML message so the full text can be copied to clipboard then with something like dcMsg.getFullText()
• dcMsg.getFullText() implementation should avoid the problem of not being possible to edit the message because the HTML stuff is used (or otherwise keep the rest of the api the same but just make it possible to update the HTML part for long text messages)

[link2xt]

There is a PR #7749 that allows to disable truncating long messages, needs a corresponding Android PR now.