Disable new line in custom field name

[Zhiming Zhang]

I have a few custom fields with long names (in fact they are questions like how many users in the company). I notice that in detail section, the field name was put in two lines. (see the screenshot) Is there a way that I can disable the new line so that the field name stays in one line?

[Steven F Behnke]

There's no OOTB way, no.

To be honest, this is a bad pratice. In my opinion, field names should be short, succint, one word. Entire questions and sentances are hard. 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I tend to agree with Steven - if a field name has to explain what you're asking, it's probably not that useful to the user.  Most explanations should be in field descriptions (and potentially longer)

All of the fields you've got there that wrap are easy to shorten (except "number of user identified", because that does not really explain anything)

[Steven F Behnke]

Because of the practice of naming fields like that, my current main JIRA instance has 1,850 custom fields. The names are too unique and (everyone was admin) people kept adding more and more.

This has put the system in a dangerous position: The performance is massively hindered by the complexity that has been added, and there's no simple way to clean it up. 

For now, I'm simply creating better, more generic fields for use. As appropriate I migrate data to the more usable fields and drop out the existing ones. DON'T do what my employer did, for heavens sake.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

We call it "fielditis" here.  It's a common thing to see when we're called in to clean up a JIRA instance that's suffered "too many admins".

It's increasingly causing problems in the UI as well - Atlassian are coding in ways that simply don't work when you've got too many fields.

The example I've got is a site with 50 variations on "status" (i.e. 49 too many).  In older versions of JIRA, if you wanted to add status to the issue navigator, the drop-down only listed the first 20-ish that weren't on the navigator already, and you could add a few duff ones until the list included the one you wanted.  Later versions use a checkbox system that always lists the first 20ish, and does not shorted.  So if you have too many status fields, you can't do it.

Use better field names, and keep the number of them sensible.

[Steven F Behnke]

Yeah, I've seen that too, 'approver' is the problematic word here.

The custom field screen takes 2 minutes to load. The screens screen takes about the same. Field configurations are horrible. Whew. I'm getting worked up just thinking about it.