Track mentions

[desh]

Title:
Track mentions

Area:
notifications

Summary:
Enable users to track when they're mentioned elsewhere on DW.

Description:
Any time someone writes an entry with <user name="desh"> (desh) in it, that should fire off an event that I can subscribe to and be notified for.

Ideally, this would fire every time an entry is posted that I have access to and that mentions my name, every time an entry that I have access to is edited and mentions my name but didn't mention it pre-editing, and every time the access rules for an entry are edited such that I now have access to it and my name's in it. (It's probably a bad idea to also notify for all old entries any time someone adds me to their access list, though.)

The same would happen for new/edited comments (either as a separate "when I'm mentioned in a comment" event, or as part of the same "when I'm mentioned anywhere" event).

EDIT: There are a lot of variations and pros and cons discussed in the comments below. For those who are not interested in reading all of it, I'd like to direct you to this thread, in which a so-far-noncontroversial modification is discussed.

Poll #2387 Track mentions

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 51

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
11 (21.6%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
17 (33.3%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
19 (37.3%)

(I have no opinion)
4 (7.8%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[zvi]

Well, since it's going through the notification system, receiving notifications should probably actually not be opt-in. I think it's a reasonable assumption that users know how to control their notifications, and once they get the first notification (or first wave of notifications), they can decide if it's useful to them and change it as they like. If it's opt-in, then nobody discovers it unless they read the entire news post where it's announced (or, subsequently, are cruising through the FAQs looking for cool stuff we can do), which is a smaller subset than active users, I'm pretty sure.

Re the aforementioned haters; munging their names is established behavior. To foil this notification system, all one would have to do is not user-fy the person being discussed, and they wouldn't be notified even if they were tracking.

Can you specifically talk about why opting out of site search/latest feed doesn't give enough control for opting out?

[rydra_wong]

Can you specifically talk about why opting out of site search/latest feed doesn't give enough control for opting out?

Well, because it's not the same thing. It seems fairly probable that someone who's opted out of search/latest also won't want people to be notified, but there may well be people who are fine with having their journal searchable but don't want notifications sent to everyone they mention.

It's the difference between, say, criticizing someone's fic in a public post and criticizing their fic and sending them a PM saying "hey, I'm talking about your fic here."

One of the things about Sh*tt*rl*y is that searching one's one name that relentlessly and frequently actually takes a lot of energy and obsessiveness. Automatic notifications make that infinitely easier and more convenient.

I think it does change people's behaviour in a quite radical way, so I'd feel strongly that it should be an opt-in.

[coraa]

I think it does change people's behaviour in a quite radical way, so I'd feel strongly that it should be an opt-in.

Yes. My immediate thought was to do with book reviews, which I write. Not infrequently if the book I'm reviewing was written by an author on LJ, I'll link to the journal just for the information of my flist. And I accept that some authors relentlessly search for mentions of themselves and might notice and post about my review.

But I've seen enough situations where someone posted a review—even one that's mixed or even mostly positive—where the author linked to the review and their fans came and said nasty things about the review, or insulted the reviewer. I'm okay with the possibility that the author would search and find my review, but I don't want to notify them of it. A notification-of-links-that-reference-you system would either make me much more circumspect about my reviews because I didn't want a fanbase sicced on me (not, I think, a positive), or would make me fail to link authors with their LJ names (which would prevent interested readers from finding and following authors they liked... also not a positive, either for the reader or for the writer).