I entered "遠藤真美様を担当して頂きます" as my bug alias. Afaik that's 14 characters. but Bugzilla told me that aliases cannot be longer than 20 characters. Hat worn: confused end user who typed 14 glyphs and doesn't understand how that relates to an error message indicating that aliases cannot be longer than 20 characters. Expected results: Error message should clearly explain and indicate how the input fails to match the expectations and suggest input that would match expectations. Actual results: Alias Too Long Bug aliases cannot be longer than 20 characters. Please choose a shorter alias.

ok, that's no fair. i did *not* enter what you see in comment 0!. i entered: "遠藤真美様を担当して頂きます"

Bug 304550 will solve this by making varchar(20) really mean "20 characters" and not "20 bytes." *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 304550 ***

tested: https://bugzilla-test.mozilla.org/process_bug.cgi?delta_ts=2006-06-22+11%3A27%3A19&longdesclength=4&id=238655&alias=%26%2336960%3B%26%2334276%3B%26%2330495%3B%26%2332654%3B%26%2327096%3B%26%2312434%3B%26%2325285%3B%26%2324403%3B%26%2312375%3B%26%2312390%3B%26%2338914%3B%26%2312365%3B%26%2312414%3B%26%2312377%3B&product=Bugzilla&component=Creating%2FChanging+Bugs&rep_platform=All&op_sys=All&version=unspecified&priority=--&bug_severity=minor&target_milestone=---&newcc=&qa_contact=default-qa%40bugzilla.bugs&bug_file_loc=&short_desc=Do+not+allow+%26+in+bug+aliases&status_whiteboard=&keywords=&flag_type-38=X&flag_type-247=X&flag_type-215=X&flag_type-225=X&flag_type-160=X&flag_type-226=X&flag_type-98=X&flag_type-227=X&flag-59042=-&flag_type-74=X&requestee_type-74=&flag_type-216=X&requestee_type-216=&flag_type-163=X&requestee_type-163=&flag_type-100=X&requestee_type-100=&flag_type-254=X&requestee_type-254=&dependson=&blocked=&comment=&knob=none&resolution=FIXED&dup_id=&assigned_to=myk%40mozilla.org&form_name=process_bug it gave me the same confusing error message. please explain.

IIRC length($str) doesn't deal too well with UTF-8 strings such that length($str) > 20 may return false if a UTF-8 string is only 14 chars.

Right, that bug didn't fix it because of how DBI works. The new bug for fixing this globally is bug 363153.

I don't believe this bug is a duplicate of bug 363153 -- this string is coming from the user, not from DBI so I doubt changing the DBI settings is going to help.

I can confirm that the patch from bug 363153 didn't fix this bug.

I can confirm this is fixed in 3.2: https://landfill.bugzilla.org/bugzilla-3.2-branch/show_bug.cgi?id=6999 Not sure if it was 'fixed' by Perl module upgrades along with bug 363153

Okay. So fixed somehow or another in 3.2. :-)

This is a Windows* OS/file system issue.The cause is directory paths on the drive is longer than 255 characters (including spaces).There's a lot of additional softwares which can fix this problem like Long Path Tool. http://PathTooDeep.com Long Path Tool can simplify and probably end your problems in unlocking, managing and renaming files that appear to have a long filename.