Implemented @Username tagging syntax in posts with alert notifications

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TECK said:
It would be nice if Xen could recognize the @KierDarby text and transform it into a live link.
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That would be nice.

On a related note, it really irks me that some people like to do @username instead of quoting the post, so I have to scroll back up to find out what they are talking about. I've seen it a lot lately and I blame Twitter for that.
 
Would it be a good idea to treat @Username syntax in posts differently? For example, if I write @Kier in a post, then it would automatically be linked to his profile and/or he would automatically get an alert for my post. Pros/cons? This might conflict with people writing an email address in a post, but (1) that's not very common due to spammers, and (2) you could require the @ to have whitespace in front of it for it to work like this, since if it's in an email address, it would never have whitespace in front of it.
 
Derek Ivey said:
This seems like a duplicate of the thread you linked to...
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I agree and disagree they are the same and different ;) however I have replied to this idea in the other thread... I will quote...

Ceri May said:
There are problems with the @ idea in that say for example my name is Ceri May with a space... @Ceri May wouldn't work.... as it would be @ to Ceri not to Ceri May... On a mod for vB that did this they had to resort to using the ; tag... so you got @Ceri May; but this became more complicate than it needed.... Again I think just alert on quote would be good enough.
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I think there are issues with how efficient this could be as it would have to search for every @X with a regex and determine if that user exists or not both of which are expensive functions especially regexes.
 
The problem with this is that people would start using the @username thing instead of using quotes. This would make it harder for others to follow the conversation. I agree that there should be some kind of reply notification, but I don't think this is the way to go.
 
Been Told said:
The problem with this is that people would start using the @username thing instead of using quotes. This would make it harder for others to follow the conversation. I agree that there should be some kind of reply notification, but I don't think this is the way to go.
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Indeed, especially for fast-moving threads it gets annoyingly confusing when someone types "@username I agree!" and then I have to run around trying to find out what the reply was about. Some people do it here and it's confusing. I've taken to just ignoring those kind of posts because they offer no context about what they are replying to.
 
Thanks for the discussion folks. I think the deal breaker is that usernames can have spaces in them, making this very hard to pull off. So doing something like this is probably not a very good idea.
 
cedivad said:
+10 for this.
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As Enigma said because of the ability to have spaces in usernames this would be both very server intensive and complicated for the users to do... The only really easy way to do this would be to limit username's to dis-allow spaces and I don't think that would go down to well.
 

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