What on earth is...

[Gatt]

So in theory you could really annoy people eventually by mentioning them poitntlessly? Can you turn off notifications?

Yes - in the UserCP under Settings (right at the bottom!)

[ZeroHour]

Hmm. If it was me, I'd provide a SOAP interface to the username list ("here's a list of words in the post, are any of them usernames", with a SELECT filter) and let the client-side do the matching work. Probably still a bit heavy though.

Getting rid of the "@" in a displayed post after the event would be good though.

Yeh it could be slow.

I liked having the @ myself as I thought it made it a little more obvious what happened. Thoughts?

[Gatt]

I don't mind the @ at the front - though can we not auto-add the semi-colon if the @ prefix is used with a valid username?

[Gatt]

Btw... shouldn't we merge this and the "@Username" thread now?

[elsiegee40]

Ah, ok, I'm sold on that one. However, do we have to have a special syntax for it? The tags feature has shown that if it's optional, it won't be used, and if it's not used consistently nobody benefits. I'm of the opinion that any mentioned username should be tagged automatically (and retrospectively) without a twitterism in front of it.

Automatic tagging sounds a good idea until someone takes the name iPad, FOIA or ID10T (apologies if I've mentioned any real usrs, but I'm not off to check!)

Prefixing with @ is good idea to stop auto tagging by accident.

As for the semi-colon on the end, we'll soon get used to it