User tagging // "Mention" name feature like on reddit

(english since I know the userbase is quite diverse on here)

Hey guys,

I recently thought about this feature when discussing in a music related thread--it would be so cool to be able to tag a user / "mention" a users name like on reddit (/u/username). Mentioning a name would have the effect that the name is clickable and leads to the linked persons profile. On the other hand, it would notify the person who has been linked. This would enhance the social experience in my opinion.

I know this forum is based on vBulletin so I've looked up whether there are existing plugins, this seems to be the most polished product out there: [Only registered and activated users can see links. Click Here To Register...]

Curious about your opinion!

Cheers,
aydio

I would like this function, however this will also result in useless tags aka spam

I don't think it's really necessary; Rather a little "nice to have" feature.
Additionally you can't just add any plugin/addon. It has to assort well with other addons and the board itself.

You may be interested in this small browser userscript which seems to do what you want: [Only registered and activated users can see links. Click Here To Register...]

Quote:

Originally Posted by TheRealKiwi I would like this function, however this will also result in useless tags aka spam

Well, private messages and visitor messages would belong to the same category of "possiblities to spam". An idea should not be taken into consideration only because it could be used in a toxic way. Further is there a way to work around this possible problem:

A requirement would be that the addon takes care of the vBulletin ignore function. Users should not get notifications if mentioned by a blocked/ignored user.


I have been able to collection some experience with this feature in other forums and I have to admit, that it was really useful to know when people want your attention without having to look trough the whole forum.

I see what you mean, but still I could see this resulting in the same way facebook mentions would work. I would rather see a "check out this thread" feature so you can tag people to threads without unnecessary posts.

We've brainstormed this feature in one of the past admin meetings a little bit. There are multiple ways to implement such a feature, but there are some drawbacks regarding the performance, as it requires a username search through the whole user db. However, we have some ideas to get it working in a fast way, at least for being quoted.

So maybe we'll add this in the future, but we're working on some other new addons at the moment, which will be announced soon.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Luke We've brainstormed this feature in one of the past admin meetings a little bit. There are multiple ways to implement such a feature, but there are some drawbacks regarding the performance, as it requires a username search through the whole user db. However, we have some ideas to get it working in a fast way, at least for being quoted. So maybe we'll add this in the feature, but we're working on some other new addons at the moment, which will be announced soon.

Sounds great! The performance could be improved if the tagging-task, which searches for tags in a post and looks up the user in the database, is moved into a background-job (e.g. cronjob) and executes its database search in low-priority mode. This would delay the notifications, but they're not time-critical anyways.