after I changed some text, portal widget no longer appears in option summary in service portal

[sbh]

I know that labels and rich text labels don't appear in option summaries in the service portal so I added a custom variable and linked it to a widget with the HTML for the text. It appears in rich text on the request form and in plain text on the option summary. Links also appear as plain text in the option summary. This has been working since June in production, both before and after the upgrade from Utah to Vancouver. It also still works in our test instance, where no changes have been made to the form.

I changed an email address in the text of the widget's message in dev, along with some other requested changes (to other parts of the form, not to the widget). I just noticed that none of the text appears in the option summaries of the test requests in dev - and all that changed in the widget was an email address. What could have caused this change in behavior?

Thanks in advance for any help!

[sbh]

The new message is two characters longer than the old one was. Thinking there might be a character limit on variables displayed in the option summary, I tried shortening the message but it made no difference.