Stock Attribute and Text Fields

Hello,

I have read hundreds of pages on Stock by Attribute and this issue was mentioned but no solution was ever posted (may have missed it)

How do you ignore a text field in your stock count? See examples below:

Customer purchases a tshirt and wants a name on it with a number.

• Tshirt size: Small
• Name on tshirt: ZenCart
• Number on tshirt: 12

Always displays stock as 0..when there are 5 in stock.

When I set the text fields to display only (works great if you do not enter a value) but as soon as the customer enters a name/number it says stock is 0.

Is there a way to ignore this from the stock count and just use it for display purposes? I just need to know what the number/name is the customer requires..its more of a note rather than a stock.

Please help...I have spend days on this.

Can someone please tell me if this is possible? or maybe I'm setting up the Attributes incorrectly?
Thank you.

I suspect that there's no solution listed, because nobody has one. The original design didn't allow for excluding any attributes when constructing product variants.