Upgrade StorageField lengths
I just noticed a sync failure, caused by a family name field that was excessively long. Shortening the field content (which was very long indeed) cleared it, so no problems there.
But I wonder whether it might make sense to catch field length issues at an earlier stage, maybe by issuing a warning popup or a red-text notice upon capture, or by flagging the item itself with a visual cue? When the problem crops up as a sync failure, it's tempting to jump to the conclusion that there's some problem with sync. In the worst case, a novice user might just give up ("That sync feature doesn't work for me, Zotero's a little quirky"). In the less worse case, it generates traffic for Dan to deal with, which is still a loss all around.
But I wonder whether it might make sense to catch field length issues at an earlier stage, maybe by issuing a warning popup or a red-text notice upon capture, or by flagging the item itself with a visual cue? When the problem crops up as a sync failure, it's tempting to jump to the conclusion that there's some problem with sync. In the worst case, a novice user might just give up ("That sync feature doesn't work for me, Zotero's a little quirky"). In the less worse case, it generates traffic for Dan to deal with, which is still a loss all around.
For long tags there's a wizard that pops up when the server returns a tag-too-long sync error. Ideally there would be similar dialogs for other fields so that they didn't appear as generic sync errors (which, as you note, are likely alarming and/or off-putting). We just haven't gotten around to implementing those yet. It won't happen for 2.0, but I've created a ticket for 2.1.