[RFC] Ability to @mention specific users in posts

[DavidIQ]

We are talked about adding auto complete to mentions right?
So if someone adds an "@" phpBB will then start trying to auto complete after for example 3 additional letters are typed. Just like on smartphones and tablets. Then it shouldn't matter if someone wanted to use a name made up entirely of @'s and spaces.

Am I missing something obvious?

You're not. They seem to be arguing outside of this idea, which is probably what we'd go with anyways:

There might be an auto-complete plugin by jQuery that might work for this though and won't need the WYSIWYG editor so that as one types the "@" without any text before it and follows it with letters or numbers one can select from a list and the user gets inserted. Would be kind of like Facebook does it I guess.

So in the end it doesn't matter if we use a BBCode or not (we probably would) as it would be taken care of "behind the scenes" through the auto-complete list. There is no point in arguing if we'd use the @ symbol to make this work sometimes or a BBCode to make it work all the time since it would likely end up being a combination of both.

[Pony99CA]

So in the end it doesn't matter if we use a BBCode or not (we probably would) as it would be taken care of "behind the scenes" through the auto-complete list. There is no point in arguing if we'd use the @ symbol to make this work sometimes or a BBCode to make it work all the time since it would likely end up being a combination of both.

So if we use a [mention] BBCode and somebody "funny" creates a user name of "[/mention]" (as was done above), what gets generated when somebody types "@[/mention]"? In other words, would the display of the post or the notification fail because we'd probably get something like [mention][/mention][/mention]?

Steve

[Mess]

The person using the name [/mention] would not be able to get mentioned.
I'm pretty sure we can live with that.

[omniError]

Don't let the long tail edge cases derail the objective. It's perfectly fine to explain in the docs that mentioning won't work automatically with whatever the exclusion has to be.

[AmigoJack]

something like [mention][/mention][/mention]

If phpBB would accept escapings (i.e. to write a BBCode that should not be parsed) all these cases would be covered. Such a username would then be inserted by the board literally as [mention]\[/mention\][/mention] but display as [mention][/mention][/mention] and parsed as @[/mention].

[Volksdevil]

I don't know if this is feasible or not, but maybe this could be another way to mention somebody?



Tatiana has created an extension that includes the above. When you click a users 'username' you have a link to 'refer to them'. When clicked it pops this into the posting area:
[ref]Example_Username[/ref],

Along the lines of the bbcode idea I suppose...Just a thought really. Maybe even add a link under peoples usernames instead of the above image/idea? 'Refer to this user' or similar?

[hanakin]

@Volksdevil, that does not cover all usecases as it does not allow mentioning those outside the current topic

[Volksdevil]

Ah, fair point, hadn't thought about that. It's a nice solution otherwise...

[Louis7777]

I think that we should take it for granted that the user initially types "@" and few characters and then a popup will come up with username results where he will select one. That can be done. Keep in mind that we already have a live member search.

In my opinion, we shouldn't be considering any other ways like clicking on buttons, manually typing BBCode etc. The above is the popular and established way.

So we should focus on what happens after the user selects the username.

[Volksdevil]

Agreed. Sounds like the easiest and most obvious route to go. Keeps UI the same too.