Project creation silently fails with React crash when name/identifier contains special characters

[erickt23]

Describe the bug

Creating a project with a special character (e.g. +) in the Project name field causes the API to return 400 Bad Request, but the frontend does not surface a field-level validation message. Instead, the React app crashes with minified
errors #418 and #423, and the user is left with no feedback about what went wrong.

Steps to reproduce

1. Self-host Plane (community edition, stable images) behind a reverse proxy.
2. Sign in, create a workspace.
3. Click Create Project.
4. Enter a project name containing + (e.g. Foo + Bar).
5. Pick any valid identifier and submit.

Expected behavior

• Inline validation error on the Name (or Identifier) field telling the user which characters are not allowed.
• No console crash; form remains interactive so the user can correct the input.

Actual behavior

• POST /api/workspaces/{slug}/projects/ returns 400 (duration ~40 ms — serializer rejection).
• Frontend logs:
  Uncaught Error: Minified React error feat: issue filter views  #418
  Uncaught Error: Minified React error feat: jitsu events for sign in and sign up #423
  ...
  store-context-*.js Failed to create project from project store
• The error toast (if any) does not indicate which field is invalid.
• Removing the special character from the name allows the project to be created normally.

Environment

• Plane version: stable (self-hosted, makeplane/plane-*:stable, pulled 2026-04-28)
• Deployment: docker-compose (CLI community), ARM64 (Raspberry Pi 5)
• Browser: Chrome 147 on Linux
• Reverse proxy: bundled plane-proxy (Caddy) → external nginx → Cloudflare Tunnel

Suggested fix

• Catch the 400 response in the project-creation store and map serializer errors to per-field messages on the form.
• Alternatively, validate the allowed character set client-side before submission so users get immediate feedback.

Additional context

The same pattern likely affects any field whose validation is enforced only server-side. Workaround: keep names and
identifiers strictly alphanumeric.