[RFC] Ability to @mention specific users in posts

[jsebean]

Personally I wouldn't like to have this kind of PM mixedup with the rest of the PMs, I'd rather have a folder specially made for these warnings. I think you should take that in mind while implementing this feature, don't force the user to receive the PM about this in the inbox, allow him to choose the folder to receive this.

^ that.
There should be some sort of "notification" box which is used for these kind of notifications. I don't think that the end user should be able to chose, just add a new special box for these kind of notifications.

+1, exactly how I saw Xenforo work. If you had a seperate area for notifications then that would also leave room to add more features, and allow mods to take advantage of it.

[naderman]

I agree with this not being sent out as PMs, I think it should be a new type of notification which the user can select to receive via email like topic reply notifications etc.

What are we going to do about usernames containing spaces?

This should be combined with username autocomplete in the post editor.

[jsebean]

What are we going to do about usernames containing spaces?

This should be combined with username autocomplete in the post editor.

Same as facebook tagging does.

[Senky]

+1

Even though I think of...how would posts change when @mention option will be turned off in ACP? You will process all the posts and remove links? I would rather add new BBCode, which can be used independently (ie: [user]Senky[/user]) + each @mention will be parsed to this BBCode - and disallowing it in ACP would make parser not to parse BBCode to URL, but simply to plain text.

[callumacrae]

+1

Even though I think of...how would posts change when @mention option will be turned off in ACP? You will process all the posts and remove links? I would rather add new BBCode, which can be used independently (ie: [user]Senky[/user]) + each @mention will be parsed to this BBCode - and disallowing it in ACP would make parser not to parse BBCode to URL, but simply to plain text.

-1 to the BBCode.

When the mention option is turned off, simply leave the old posts alone and don't parse new ones.

[brunoais]

^
AFAIK, posts are parsed before being shown to the user that is viewing the forum. So this is not actually a problem

[Senky]

...posts are parsed before being shown to the user that is viewing the forum. So this is not actually a problem

In fact, it is, when it will be parsed to URL BBCode. You cannot simply define which URL BBCode was generated by @mention and which was added separatelly. You can either remove all links to users' profiles, or keep them all. Anyway, we can do it as callumacrae advises...

[naderman]

This should be handled entirely separate from bbcodes. It should not generate a BBCode and it should not be a BBCode.

What are we going to do about usernames containing spaces?
Same as facebook tagging does.

Well for facebook that is a lot easier, since it only needs to look for your friends. On a phpBB board the number of usernames may be hundreds of thousands, so checking all of them isn't an option. So we need to generate a SQL query to search for users by the name following an @. How do we do that if any number of words following the @ can make up a name?

merged content:
Actually to answer my own question, it's not that difficult. We just do SELECT FROM phpbb_users WHERE username LIKE 'firstword %'; and then check if any of those match the following words. If the query returns too many results we can repeat it with WHERE username LIKE 'firstword secondword %', etc.

[jsebean]

If there is a wide match you could use the already existing find user system that's already used in PMs and the ACP.

[Senky]

Plase note this:
if you want to add an option to @mention multi-word usernames, it is not problem with JS, however without JS, you need to think of how to do it in plain textarea! I would suggest an option to @mention someone with quotes, like:

@"my nickname"

otherwise it is almost impossible to correctly catch all mentions of multi-word usernames by php parser.