Can I put spaces in Jira Label fields?

[Jane Ellis]

Am I able to include a space in a label field? For example a user's first then last name, or does there need to be a dash or comma to separate words?

Seems very simple but can't seem to find an explanation.

Thanks, Jane

[Steven F Behnke]

To be frank, it's clear there's separate use-cases for Labels. Those who have been using Jira and Atlassian products for years know that Labels are for adding discrete searchable data points to issues for help in querying. Others seem to think it's for fuzzy searching. 

Since labels ONLY work with = or EXACT match, those expecting fuzzy searching are going to be sorely disappointed when they discover that is not how they're implemented and not how they work. 

[markusdrake]

Need to have spaces in labels.

Enter, or comma, would be the most natural key to listen for and start new labels.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

And I need a pet thermonuclear warhead.  Please have a read of the conversations above, a statement of "I want" is pointless in the face of evidence.

[Monique vdB]

@markusdrake feel free to disagree with @Nic Brough -Adaptavist- but please refrain from using abusive language in the process.  Thanks!

[Alwyn Durham]

If a sizable number of JIRA customers want to use spaces in their labels, I would consider that to be sufficient evidence that it would be a valuable addition to the product.  It's obviously a pain point for certain use cases.

[Alwyn Durham]

Here's an example of the labels we're using at Evisions.  They contain Alt-code "spaces" to make them more readable.  This has been working really well for us.  My only complaint is that the alt codes are difficult to type when the label is first created.  Other than that, the spaces bring much-needed readability to an otherwise (necessarily) complex label.

[Matt Doar]

How well does searching for labels with non-breaking spaces work?

[Alwyn Durham]

When searching, I can just type a regular space and it finds it with no problem.  The autocomplete also works.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

But you can't find anything you want to unless you know exactly what you are looking for.  You have four labels in your screenshot, of which

Two of them are useless because no-on cares about "xxx yyy zzz".  They DO care about keyboard-navigation, names, roles and values.
The third is even more dreadful.  What does "Level A" mean? 
Same for WCAG 2.0

Seriously, go back to your business and think about how you might map your process on to tools.

[Steven F Behnke]

It's depressing but I fear 99% of people don't care about data, or business process, or implementation. :/

[Alwyn Durham]

Nic, I'm not sure how you can make that claim without being in an environment that actually uses these labels.  We're working on WCAG 2.0 compliance.  The "Level A" label is helpful because we can search for issues that are preventing us from meeting this first level of compliance.  WCAG 2.0 distinguishes issues that are required by the WCAG 2.0 accessibility standards, as opposed to accessibility-related tickets that aren't strictly required for compliance, or that address a different accessibility standard.  And knowing the specific criteria the ticket pertains to is absolutely invaluable when it comes time to update our VPATs.

Regardless, criticizing labels that other people find useful doesn't contribute to the discussion about whether or not *spaces* are useful.  I would appreciate it if you could retain a minimum level of civility in your responses.  Otherwise, I've said my piece here.  Have a good day.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I do work in several environments that use labels.  I've spent over 20 years in these environments.  I have yet to find one where spaces in labels work, and I've been specifically commissioned to write code to expunge them, because they do not work.  At all. 

Your screenshot and explanation is useful to see how you're thinking, but it supports my point better.  You fail to explain the first two labels (I have to assume because you have recognised that they're pretty much useless).  The Level A label is useless without specific context and could easily have been built without an unnecessary space as it has no benefit.  The WCAG label is poor because it has a space in it.  How would you use it to distinguish between versions of WCAG?  (I made that point before, admittedly very badly)

Some separators are definitely needed, but spaces are inconsistent in the way humans think of them, and hence just lead us to having labels that are useless.  As I keep pointing out an obvious example, there were 20,000 labels here in the community.  One third of these were useless noise because they contain spaces.

I would appreciate it if you could have the civility to read what I've said properly.  All I'm asking for is a good reason that spaces in labels are useful.  No-one has done that yet.

[markusdrake]

No I will not refrain from using "abusive language" - I use adult language because I'm old enough to and understand the meaning of the words. I'll apologize when I've used the incorrect one - but the post you referenced was 100% on point.

And I did read your thread above Nic but you're a [crankypants]. You think you are the be-all and end-all of human thought patterns. I don't know what role you serve at Atlassian, but you are still a company that requires customers to buy their software or subscribe to their services. You are a waiter - not a gatekeeper. You are here to serve - not to persuade nor act like a [poopybutt]. Mark that as "abusive" if you want.

Based on your abusive stance towards ideas that are different than yours perhaps I should just go back to my company and recommend we move to a completely different solution in the future. Your software is not revolutionary by any means, it's just convenient. I'm pretty sure we could build this via open source pretty quickly. A quick search showed me Open Project - looks a lot cheaper than our bill from Atlassian and we can quickly edit the source code and make our own contributions back to the software. 

Good luck with this business model you have here.

[markusdrake]

Here at Alassian we feel searching is too difficult of a task, and updating the existing code to add new features is "hacking it".

We store your labels as a big blob of text (wrong) and when you give us a search term like "WCAG 2.0" it gives our Jira back-end diarrhea. You don't want the server to shit in it's rack do you? Of course you don't! That's why we don't allow spaces.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I have a strong opinion that differs from yours, and I offer evidence to support it.

Resorting to name calling instead of evidence just tells me that you know you're wrong, as it's a argumentum ad hominem.

Finally, I'm not an Atlassian, I'm an admin of their software who has spent far too much time with broken searches and cleaning up the mess made by people doing the wrong thing, however well-intentioned.

[Monique vdB]

Some language edited. @markusdrake,the issue isn't the language itself, it's the personal attack. Please take a minute to review our community guidelines.

[markusdrake]

Yeah Monique you don't deserve this, so I'm dropping out of the conversation. Thank you for being civil at least. I do respect you for that. 

I imagine most feedback goes nowhere here, and I've already made a decision to invest in an open source alternative. I can't imagine having to fight with people to make simple changes like this especially when they are well supported (and apparently well known issues since people like Nic spend countless years correcting customer environments). Should be a red flag when you did it the second, third, and 100th time.

[Ryan McLaughlin]

Is there a ticket for this so I can go add my vote?

[Alwyn Durham]

We're on JIRA version 6.4.11 and I can insert spaces into labels using Alt+0160 on the numpad.  I know there were some earlier versions where this stopped working, but I'm glad to have it back.  Hopefully this doesn't get removed again because it's definitely required functionality for us.

[Ryan McLaughlin]

Unfortunately that does not work on an Apple computer

[Alwyn Durham]

Try Option+Space?  Not sure if it will work but that's apparently the Mac equivalent.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-breaking_space#Keyboard_entry_methods

[Ryan McLaughlin]

Thanks for the suggestion, but it just puts in a regular space

I should also mention that I am on Jira Cloud, so it is possible in my version non of those would work.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Please don't.

This community has over 18,000 labels.  80% of them are utterly useless, and of that 80%, one quarter were created by a (defunct) automation, one quarter by misspellings and the rest by people using spaces in labels.

[Ryan McLaughlin]

As was said above, if it were configurable then this community could choose not to allow it. However there are others, including me, that would like it.

[Alwyn Durham]

Nic, other companies use JIRA in different ways from how you use it.  We need spaces for our use cases.  If you don't need them, don't use them.  Making it an option to configure the behavior would address both situations.  Allowing or disallowing spaces isn't going to prevent people from inserting unhelpful or misspelled labels.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

You might want to take a look at the James Joyce quote above.  It's a valid label.  Because of the terrible idea of allowing spaces in them.

The problems this community have with broken labels is under active discussion right now, and remember that we only moved to this platform a few months ago, and inherited a LOT of historical junk, including poor labels.

The history is a fantastic example of why labels should absolutely be limited, and why spaces are an awful thing to do.

The community lead Atlassians have recently asked the champions to clean up, and while the current goal is to clean up the most easy targets (singleton labels, used only once), we are talking about rules or conventions for labels, and how to enforce them.

My opinion has shifted slightly since the previous postings, but not a lot.  I like spaces in labels a bit more.  But only with hard constraints.  It is very very clear that labels with spaces don't work, but the problem is not really the spaces, it's the separators.  My earlier opinion was "use single words".  That is still by far the best choice, because it allows for the clearest flexible combined search, but is weaker when you do have a specific. 

I have changed, I can accept a well-used separator.  But not more than one, and not repeated. So, now, I would say that a label should be limited to:

• a-z
• 0-9
• One, single, separator.  A space is fine, - is fine, , is fine, but never more than one.  (Here, we have inherited the problem of "Jira Software, Jira-Software and JiraSoftware" - at the very least, we need to block either spaces or hyphens)
• Never more than two separators in a label  (Or, better, one, but I really can't be bothered to argue that two still allows for the build up of way too many useless labels because people are too opinionated to accept the proof)

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

>Allowing or disallowing spaces isn't going to prevent people from inserting unhelpful or misspelled labels

Absolutely right.  My concern here was never about misspelled labels or people adding useless ones like "absquatulation", which, despite my spell checker's objection, is a real word.  We can't fix those.

My worry is all about people using spaces to generate useless labels.  Which they will do if they're allowed to.  (See essay posted while you were typing)

[Judy]

Spaces should be allowed in labels. I am trying to create a label called "visual editor" and I cannot. Instead I have to put a dash in it. Who is going to search for "visual-editor"? No one. So now I have the extra task of educating my entire company to put dashes in their search terms. Very user unfriendly. And then that dashed search term, if I can even get people to use it, won't match pages where I've used "visual editor" in a sentence. This is a major roadblock in using Confluence as the place employees come to find information.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Wrong.  This community has just started on a mini-project to clean up the tags.

There are over 18,000 individual tags.

• 70% look useless because they are only used once.  Of this block
• Around 5% are mistakes, mis-spellings or posting on the wrong subjects 
• Around 20% are single words
• The rest are sentences, because the old systems allowed spaces

That's at least 9,450 useless tags directly caused by spaces.  9,450.  That's idiotic and should never have been allowed. 

But it's higher than that.  The 30% of tags that are used more than once, I've not done a lot of analysis on, but it is very clear that spaces have caused massive problems in them as well.  People have reused two+ clauses, so we've got a huge pile of useless tags that have been used two or three times.  We've also got separator madness (not specifically a space problem, but spaces are a contributor) - tens of thousands of tags that are duplicated, but not quite the same.

[Matt Doar]

Good info, Nic. And let's not raise the whole case sensitive or insensitive kettle of fish!

[Colton English]

@Nic Brough -Adaptavist-, Wrong!

It'd be great if Atlassian didn't have such big-headed moderators.  While the statistics are very beneficial and appreciated, telling customers their desire for two word labels is wrong.  I'm presently here because atlassian doesn't have support for the label "phone request".  And rather than helping your the users, you've approached the topic with an arrogant tone that hurts community relations.

Labels: big-headed, community disagreement, rebuttal. 

PS. I'll settle for suggestions on how to handle the above set of labels.

PPS. I'm not saying spaces are right for everyone's business case, but the idea that your customers are overwhelmingly frustrated by this decision in their own environment is silly.  That your customers have to manually copy and paste non-breaking spaces is silly.  Disable spaces in your own environment but don't lambast your customers for wanting a feature to work intuitively.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

<sigh> Could you try again?  Please re-read the arguments and the statistics.

If you do read it, you will find that the "desire for two word labels" is wrong.

Instead of being insulting, and arrogantly asserting something the evidence contradicts, please provide a good argument that supports your case. 

Rather than giving into your users who don't understand and, instead, helping them do what they want, you've approached the topic with an arrogance that you know what is right, which is clearly contradicted by the data I've given you.

I've pointed at a pool of 20k labels that is mostly useless because it's too large and has a lot of poor-quality entries.  The main reason it got that way is spaces in labels.  Please explain how that is an incorrect statement of fact?

If you read the conversation properly, you'd have seen my opinion change over the years.  Originally, I thought spaces were bad.  I moved towards the idea that they can be useful, but in the last year, after being asked to help clean up the mess in the community, I've realised that it's not "spaces are bad", but "spaces in labels should be nuked from orbit". 

However, my original instinct was also "no separators" - that has very much changed to "we absolutely need labels with separators", as long as it's not a space, and enforced as a consistent character.  (There's an essay on why a space is the worst choice, not for here.  I now agree we need a separator)

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Ah, and the edit:

"I'm not saying spaces are right for everyone's business case, but the idea that your customers are overwhelmingly frustrated by this decision in their own environment is silly.  That your customers have to manually copy and paste non-breaking spaces is silly.  Disable spaces in your own environment but don't lambast your customers for wanting a feature to work intuitively."

Granted.

But you're wrong that customers are frustrated.  They absolutely are frustrated that their searches don't work.  Why?  Because there are spaces in labels.

Most people don't think about non-breaking spaces.  They should not have to.  If you don't use breaking spaces in labels, they don't have to.  Stop using spaces in labels, problem solved.

If you want this feature to work intuitively, then create each word in a label as a separate label.  It's less intuitive as you type, but works for searching, and, please, please, please, READ what I said on April 17th three years ago, which clearly shows this.

[Alwyn Durham]

There's a really simple solution to the search issue.  And it works in JIRA currently (I guess not in the cloud version though?).  Auto-complete.  Start typing something, and you get suggestions for all the existing labels.  Maybe it should prompt you for confirmation and offer suggestions if you try to add a new label, to make sure it's not a duplicate.  I'm not sure why you're so dead-set against spaces as a character, since this could be an issue no matter what substitute character you used for this purpose.  Fact is, some of us want to have spaces in our own instances.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Could you PLEASE have a re-read of the previous conversation?   Specifically the most useless label in the world, and the fact that this system has thousands of utterly useless labels with spaces being the one of the biggest problems, and maybe all of the logic?

Your point about auto-complete is, in theory, good, but when your auto-complete is trying to work with hundreds of possible junk labels, they tend to struggle and often have no choice but to offer up bad labels.  That's why we're trying to get rid of them here in the community system.

I'm still waiting for someone to come up with anything resembling a good argument that spaces might be useful in labels (and "I want them" with no reason is not an argument)

[Matt Doar]

Colton,

Disagreement is fine, but one of the marks of the Atlassian community is that name-calling is not acceptable. If you have a problem with Nic, contact him directly. He's not hard to find. 

[Conor Fitzgerald]

I'll just leave this here...

[Steven F Behnke]

He's a community champion -- He wasn't elected. He contributes and has been upvoted and marked as correct time and time again, and now holds the title of champion. 

It's quite a thankless job.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

No.

Jira needs something to separate labels as people type. Spaces are the most intuitive and simple separator to use.

Many of us use _ to join words up

[Jane Ellis]

Thanks for the quick response Nic

[Arianna Fabbri]

Hi, 

is there a way to customize the labels separator? 

For example, is possible to set that space is not a separator and set that a new label is defined every time you type a comma (,)?

Thank you

Regards

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Not without hacking the code that provides the label field.

[Andrew Brown]

Commas seem like the most intuitive and simple separator to use.

[Jane Ellis]

Wow! Impressive. And all without a comma!! At least you've shown good use of grammar by using capital letters for your proper nouns :-)

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

It's from James Joyce. Used it a few times to point out that spaces are good label separators and commas really bad ones (but more often, that proper use of punctuation is a good thing)

[Andrew Brown]

That was a bit excessive, and wouldn't be a "simple and intuitive" label with _any_ separator. You could just as well have the same label in the current system by just replacing all of your spaces with underscores (as most people do to get around the space delimiter limitation). Commas, by definition, represent some separation of fragments, whether in speech or subvocalization, and are exactly the kind of separator you'd expect to delimit items in a list (as, for example, you see in lists _anywhere_ else). The use of a space separator to enforce some shortsighted single-word limitation on labels is not only unintuitive, but also ultimately pointless because anyone who wants multiple-word labels just ends up with ugly labels using hyphens or underscores anyway. Of course, this is all just a difference of opinion (you seem to think labels need to be only one word, I think there are cases where multiple words are necessary; you might think stringing words together with other delimiters is okay, I think a list of ugly labels is subpar and detrimental to a task so commonly done as manipulating labels). I'll just take my vote to JIRA and hope things improve in the future. Thanks for the explanation on why things are currently the way they are.

[Conor Fitzgerald]

Hi Nic, Hi @Nic Brough [Adaptavist], Do you think you're more likely to want a space in a label, or a comma in a label? You could check yourself by looking how many of your own labels include underscores vs. how many include commas. I suspect you will find that it'd be much more valuable to have a space in a label then a comma.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Neither. Labels should be a single word. As demonstrated above.

[Matt Wilkinson]

This is a poor solution in my opinion. I spend a lot of time just tidying up fields. We have a customer field- how many of those are single words? So We end up with [Jones] [&} [Shuffs] as three words. Users do not expect to have to type underscores between words like that.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Heh. No, I'm not always right. Ask my sister about my spoken grammar, my training manager about how I talk during training, my doctor about beer, my cat about how much catnip is "enough", my mom about raising children, a proper developer about some of my code... the list goes on. I have an open mind (although not so open that my brain falls out, like it seems to have with homeopaths or anti-vaxxers). There's plenty of questions here on Answers where someone has said "but what about ...", and my response has been "You're right, I had not thought of that, my opinion has changed". No one on this thread (or others) has yet given a strong enough argument for that to happen, but it could. And I want to emphasise that what I'm saying on this subject really is an opinion based on a bad experience with a system that used spaces in labels. I do understand the Jones & Shuff point - there are cases where spaces would be useful, but not enough of them, in my *opinion*, to override the problem that people will type sentences and not use your alternative separators well enough to keep your labels useful.

[Matt Wilkinson]

Can we just have the separation character user selectable then? Problem solved!

[Rob Manger]

Interesting discussion, and good point @Nic about some people wanting to write sentences. I've run into that myself (both in labels and item titles) and it always makes me sigh and need to take a deep breath. I still think, however, that a lot of labels need to be more than one word when categorizing something like documentation if you expect to have any form of accuracy. You could say that from a grammatical point of view, adjective + noun, or even preposition + adjective + noun, is often necessary to accurately tag something. Some examples may include: "defect management", "code branching", "canonical data modeling". When I think of delimiting something, comma seems to make more sense to me as a computer user and being familiar with something as simple as CSV files. It just seems like a logical delimiter to me. Grammar doesn't really come in to it at all when you work with computers (or if you are James Joyce, apparently). Preventing people from writing sentences would be easier managed by field length validation, but as you say, differing opinions.

[Illa]

I agree that spaces should be allowed. Label/Tag does not mean one word, it means (and if it doesn't it should!!) term, a phrase. As pointed out, they can be "This & This", it can be even things like "Dynamics Nav", "Service Desk", "Level A" etc. Comma is the logical separator of items in a list. It was correctly pointed out that you can limit the length so as not to make sentences. Though guess what - spaces don't limit making sentences. They can just copy the entire sentence anyways as separate labels like that horrible text example above would have been. There is no protection against the stupidity of users.
This was supposed to be taken to be voted on in JIRA. Where is that? I would like to vote as well against this yet another horrible case of Atlassian logic.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Sadly, this Confluence has had spaces in labels allowed.  It's a brilliant example of how to make labels look really terrible.

If you look at the topics, you can see that there's an absolutely horrid pile of rubbish labels thanks to this change.  Spaces are bad.

[Illa]

No, spaces are good. Restricting people to one word is bad. That is what creates ugly labels.

[Matt Wilkinson]

I have lost count of the number of times someone has typed out a label and not even realised it has been split into more than one because they dared to press the space bar! So we end up with 'Object' and 'Reference' instead of 'Object Reference' - just at least give us the option so we can decide!

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I've already proved, repeatedly that spaces in labels are bad. 

As Matt says, I'd prefer a choice, then I can turn the spaces off and have a system where I don't have tens of thousands of single useless labels.  And you can have the joy of spending days making the labels useful by renaming them when you realise your searches don't work

[Illa]

No, you have not proven that in any way. You are just professing your opinion here in a way that states - it is my way or the highway, anyone, who disagrees is wrong. Unfortunately you are in the wrong here. The correct option is like how you finally pointed out - an option. There are projects and people who need it one way and others who are satisfied with the current system. We are the ones that need the spaces. No matter how much you might not like that, it won't change my opinion of them or that we need them.

And as pointed out - having just one word does not make users from not making stupid labels. Your own long text is just example of that - a bunch of useless labels in the end with words like "of", "I", "1", "2", "3" etc. As said - there is no protection against human stupidity. Not to mention that besides an overall length limit (which honestly should be in place right now so that huge jargon should never be a label), there can be a simple option to how many spaces it allows - e.g. for example only two for cases of "This & That".

As for the search that already is problematic. It is so very simply again to check based on settings that if spaces are allowed (or it has spaces) - to add quotation marks.. I mean, at the moment the search is so stupid that it doesn't quote email addresses when it can detect it has an @ in it. Very simple things to add, but as with a lot things - they are not done. Just like this.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I'm afraid you've not understood the argument. 

In real life, spaces don't work because you end up with a mass of single sentences as labels that make them utterly pointless.  That's not an opinion, it's a demonstrable fact.  As a user, it sounds nice to have spaces in labels in a lot of cases, and I'm not saying that's wrong.  As an admin who has to answer the question "why can't I find anything with labels", it's wrong, it fails, and it leads to you either saying "well, your labels are useless", or spending resources trying to housekeep them.  Without spaces, you do indeed end up with a bunch of useless short labels, but people instinctively know how to ignore them, and not to bother searching them.

I quite like your point about imposing a length limit.  That's a really good option.  Allowing spaces in labels with a limited length would actually work.  You'd want to set the limit to maybe 10 or 11 to make sure you don't end up with the same problem, but it works.

[Illa]

No, in real life spaces work. It all depends who your users are. If your users that can make labels are morons (sorry for the lack of a better term), that is what you get - a mess. They can do the same mess with just words as labels - paste the entire sentence and not check that spaces separate them into different ones.

We, who use JIRA as an actual team of more educated developers, know very well how to use spaces for labels and how not. And yes, it is a demonstratable fact how single words fall short and are not meeting the requirements that people have and end up using things like Dynamics-Nav, or Dynamics_Nav which is no way makes it logical or easy. And as said, limits to spaces and the overall label length fixes the issues you fear you will have.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

They might work in a small dedicated team who know how to be careful.  In real life, humans do not behave like that when there's a large enough group.  Every system I've seen which allows spaces in labels and has more than a few thousand items in it (pages, issues, documents) is a completely unsearchable mess.  You may not have run into it enough to judge it, but I have.

[Illa]

And again as I have pointed it out before - just because you feel this way, it does not make it true. There are teams that need it and we are one of those. You keep your one word, we want spaces. And it does not matter how much you try to persuade people out of it in this thread, it does not change our team requirements. You need to be more considerate of others. You are not the only one using the software. For us it is the opposite - it is a mess because we don't have spaces and have been forced to use a hyphen.

And as said before - there is no protection against human input. That user of yours that does messy labels can very well write meaningless issues and waste your time in another way. But even so we still have the option to write them, now don't we. And not only can those options be added as outlined to make spaces more safe for your type of users - you can also add permissions on who can add labels and who not. Then you can block the ones that don't honor the system.

Please stop harassing people here and let them voice their opinions. You have said your point. You are against it. We get it. If you feel the need to argue, join a debate team! Let others speak and say what are their requirements and why they feel they need this. I, for one, have offered solutions to make spaces work for those who want it. With the limit of amount of spaces you can set it for 0 to have one word only. Everyone should be happy, but you are not. If I want to create a "mess", as you claim, that is my prerogative!

[Matt Wilkinson]

#boredofthis #givetheuserthechoice

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

<sigh> I'm not harassing anyone, I'm not stopping anyone voicing an opinion, it's a good discussion to have.

I'm simply pointing out that some "opinions" could be said to have some divergance with the reality of what happens.  I have strong feelings and a mass of experience to back up my points.  You've put up some good points about the subject, and I've explained why some of them are unrealistic or wrong, and accepted others that are not.

(The new one about "blocking people that don't honour the system" is also a good idea, but exposes another weakness - if your approach worked, you wouldn't need to block people)

You're absolutely right that it's your choice.    My opinion is that you shouldn't, because you'll almost certainly make a mess, if you've got a larger system.    Your opinion is different. 

Can we just agree to disagree?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

p.s. +1 on what Matt said while I was typing.  Let us have the choice.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

A simple agree-to-disagree would have done.

[Alwyn Durham]

I have to jump through hoops to reformat our custom release notes due to it not being able to include a space.  Some of our labels have spaces from a previous version where I could use Alt+0164 to insert one, which is fantastic, but when I need to enter a new label I can't, so I wind up manually going through and editing after I export our notes and stripping out all the commas and re-alphabetizing our two-word labels.  This is ridiculous.  Let us customize whether to allow spaces in our labels or not, so you can have it your way and the rest of us don't have to waste time.