Disallow Spaces in Image Names

Question

Hi,
There is a long running problem with Business Catalyst at this moment in time - it allows spaces in file uploads.
This is a severe problem and simply shouldn't be allowed in any modern CMS.
If I give an isolated example, I recently helped a client of mine launch an Email Campaign from their CP. Everything appears fine in all browsers, however in Gmail, images with spaces in simply break.
This comes down to our client uploading images with spaces in, which suffice to say we have told them not to do. It's easy to say we should tell our clients to do this however this will not do. It is simply a requirement of all CMS' in this day an age as files with spaces in will almost always cause problems somewhere.
Before I carry on ranting, is there a way for me to enable a requirement for spaces in file uploads?
If not, this feature needs to be implemented.
Thanks.

Answer 1

Hi Liam,
In the minds of my customers is it a BC problem or is a web problem? It is a BC problem.
Look at it this way; Facebook, twitter and the many hundreds of websites that you can upload images to either disallow you from uploading images with spaces or loop through file names and convert the image filename to be web friendly.
We can't expect less tech-savvy clients to remove spaces from their images, especially if there is no clear warning on the website to remove them. Are you suggesting, that we train each and every user of each and every website that we have built to remove spaces from their filenames?
Are you serious?
There is no debate here - BC should be doing something to fix this problem, whether it is to give adequate warning and advice during the file upload period, to rename images to be web friendly or to disallow spaces in images completely it has to be done. To suggest that this is a 'web problem' is to make excuses for Adobe. We should not have to train our clients to remove spaces from images file names.
While I agree that with the tech-savvy it is simple to remove spaces from images it is not something we should expect users to do. For an example, let's take a large scale eCommerce website. There are multiple users of that website, some tech-savvy, others not-so. This eCommerce website takes on a new user to help manage their products, who we will call John. John isn't very tech savvy.
The business-owners take John through the basics of uploading a product, possibly even suggesting he removes spaces from image file names. However, being the new guy, John doesn't remember that and fails to remove spaces from a couple of images. Nobody knows, because these images appear fine in the latest browsers. Three weeks later, this business decides to launch an email campaign, which looks great in tests to Outlook! As the business-owners are not tech-savvy, they very-happily launch the email campaign based on a template created by the original developers without testing. The original developers cannot take into account spaces in images as HTML email cannot run JavaScript.
Of course, just after the send date Employee #5 notices that all of the product images are broken in Gmail. The business-owners then swiftly contact the web developers and all the blame comes to them, despite that fact they advised them on this originally.
So in conclusion here, the business-owners lose out on valuable profits and their reputation is damaged and the web-developers reputation is scarred indefinitely, with Business Catalyst's problems being blamed on them as the reseller. Everybody loses.
And all of this could of been avoided simply if Adobe had put in adequate efforts (such as those previously described) to alleviate this problem.
To suggest that we should be training our clients and all of their new and changing users to do the following is to make excuses for Adobe's failures.