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

[desh]

Especially since this is entirely new behavior - nobody from another site would expect using [personal profile] desh to notify you

Entirely new to the LJ/DW codebase, yeah. Not at all new in the Twitter/Facebook world. I think mention-notification over there is a fantastic thing, and it's why I suggested it. LJ/DW have a much more complicated universe of privacy controls (for better or for worse, including security-through-obscurity controls), and that means that the feature would have to be implemented much more carefully, as I'm learning from the comments here. (I'm not even voting for my own suggestion to be implemented unaltered anymore.) But that complication shouldn't, in my opinion, prevent the feature from happening at all.

[cheyinka]

Hmm. Maybe instead of straight mention-notification, or the addition of a flag to the end, one could do something like <user name="@cheyinka">? (an @ will never show up in a username, after all...)

[desh]

I like that!

[coraa]

I wouldn't object to this. That reconstructs the behavior of, say, Twitter, where there's a distinction between tweeting, "I just read Ananasi Boys by Neil Gaiman" and "@neilhimself I loved Ananasi Boys."

[ursamajor]

Ooh. I really, REALLY like this. And I admit I would probably find it a lot easier to get into the habit of typing that one extra character rather than a whole new attribute (note how often I still forget/laze out about image size attributes even now that I know how inaccessible that makes things sometimes? :( )

[mark]

And then this diverges into a suggestion I've made before... just making it so we can type @username and having it create an account link... I get tired of typing faux-HTML a lot.

</random>

[desh]

Nice! And maybe your way will trigger the mention notification (subject to a dozen security restrictions) and the old-style way won't.

[noracharles]

I want this! :-D

I would also like to be able to type site=lj instead of site=livejournal.com and so on, whenever I use a username from a different site.

[mark]

I was going to use suffixes for that. Like domain names: foo.org is different from foo.com, so @mark is different from @mark.lj...

And it sort of makes sense, too. My journal is at mark.dreamwidth.org so calling me mark.dw works... @mark.dw or @xb95.lj, etc.

But then I realized that's a huge change with how people would do things and think about how to write things, and so I wasn't sure if I wanted to try to push it. I think it'd be a good change, but... yeah. Could be problematic from the social side of things.

[noracharles]

I love it. Suffixes are the way to go :-)

We've learned to type "user name=" instead of "lj user=", we can learn to do this too. And maybe you could make it so that both ways would work?

I've been thinking about your idea to reply to multiple comments when a thread has branched off and you need to bring it back together again. Now that you've put the idea in my head I've noticed every time that would have been really useful.

I understand that having a bunch of options that are so new and different that most people don't know what they're even for or how to use them would just be a mess, but dammit, I want these nifty things.

Anyway, about the usernames: I think most of us use usernames regularly in our posts or comments, and the vast majority would be thrilled to have an easier way to do it.

[matgb]

that's a huge change with how people would do things

Only for those of us that've moved from LJ, and even then, a lot of us are using Twitter anyway.

As long as the existing code still works, the newer shorthands will work for those that want to switch, and will be especially intuitive for new users from Twitter and Facebook.

Do it. Assuming it won't take too much time to code, if it will, put it in the bugs list for future assignment.

[mark]

It's super easy and would take probably an hour of work. I don't know that this is something I can Just Do without causing problems, though. I'll poke Denise to post about it in the weekly update to get some feedback.

Edit: Or I can post to the suggestions community, which is what it's there for!

[goodbyebird]

+1

[kyrielle]

+1. Or really, +1024. Or so. This would be great, and for a lot of us who have used Twitter, it'd be really easy to rewrite our habits.

I assume it would make a mild headache for the cross-poster, but probably only mild since it already has to translate the magic "tags".