Remove or extend command description maximum length

[DenverCoder1]

Summary

To make it easier for bot developers and lib devs, it would make more sense to not have a 100-character limit on Slash Command descriptions and instead let the width of the client's window or screen determine how many characters can be displayed.

The Discord client already trims the text when there is not enough space, so it should not matter if the description maximum length were to be increased, to say, 1000, or removed entirely.

Why this should be changed

1. Having such a small limit will cause many developers to run into HTTP Exceptions telling them their descriptions are too long. It is not so simple to immediately know when you have reached a 100 character limit when writing a Slash Command description.

2. Some commands need more than 100 characters to explain.

3. Most screens are wide enough to support at least 200 characters on a single line. Additionally, similar to on mobile, when the command is selected, the description could even take multiple lines.

Image showing how little space 100 characters takes up on a normal size screen with member panel collapsed:

Image showing multi-line descriptions as they appear on mobile:

5. You can't even see 100 characters in the preview at a time on mobile or narrow windows.

The description could even be much larger than 100 characters and the ellipsis ("...") will appear in the Discord client whenever it runs out of space.

6. Library developers may want a way for descriptions to be automatically generated from docstrings. In order to not make the library exceed the character limit, the limit must be hard-coded into the library so it can trim it at the right place. For maintainability, it would be better to not require hard-coding a limit that could potentially change at any time.

Additional thoughts

It would be nice if on a desktop client, you would be able to hover over the trimmed description to view the full description as a tooltip.

[amatsagu]

I understand your issue but here's the thing - How to render it? If slash commands would have longer description that would mean they would have to cover bigger space to display it. It would look ugly on PC and on mobile would be really hard to use if suddenly description label would cover like your entire screen.

I have a bit different suggestion. How about making 2 descriptions? Current description could be called "short_description" and then you would have proper "description" which could be much longer. When typing /command it would render shorter version (like it does right now). Here discord could implement some built-in command like /help <bot> <command_name> which would render a nice looking embed help page for specific bot's command, visible only to user who triggered command. Such embed would show much more info - your full description, then maybe exact permissions, etc.

[DenverCoder1]

I'm not saying descriptions should be allowed to take up the whole screen, rather the client would trim the text with "..." (as it already does) when the description begins to take up too much space.

Having the help command showing the full descriptions would be nice. I don't know if it needs to built in, as a bot could easily implement that by fetching a list of its commands and displaying all their descriptions.