Take a look at: http://barrettnewton.com/safecracker/user_guide/entry_form/#par_rules and http://barrettnewton.com/safecracker/user_guide/entry_form/#par_error_handling
Basically, I changed the underlying architecture to use CodeIgniter’s form validation class, which gives us more flexibility for displaying errors and creating validation rules for fields.
It was my intent to not change the behavior of the entry form, so that no one would notice, but that’s clearly not the case :(
I’m thinking of adding a not_required=”” param that lets you override the stated field requirements, do you think that would be fix enough for you? So in your allow comments form, you could have:
{exp:safecracker channel="x" not_required="field_a|field_b"}
I could also maybe do a field_validation=“off” parameter, but I’m not sure yet how much work that would be on my end.