Mention behaviour

If I understand you, Florian, you mean either:

• make the '@[name]' text into a 'mention' link, but not send a notification (NO to the proposal);
  • keep the '@[name]' text as plain text (YES to the proposal).

My vote is for the second (so, YES to the proposal, if I understand you correctly).

But I don't think it's a case of 'removing' a mention, as the software doesn't allow you to make a mention. I mean, you can type @goob, but if I'm not one of your contacts in that aspect, it won't allow you to turn that into a mention.

If your 'removal' proposal means that in the case above, your post would read 'I thought @goob might like this' all in plain text, with no links or anything, that's fine. If you mean that '@goob' would actually be removed from the text so that the text would read 'I thought might like this', I'm not sure that's a good idea. Good for privacy, but will make some nonsensical posts.

I definitely think that there shouldn't be a link or anything to a user who is not part of the aspect to which the post is made, as that would be a privacy leak.

You could always get the UI to stop anyone posting @[text] except where that text is the name of one of their contacts in the aspect(s) to which they are posting.

Ah - of course, the poster might select aspect(s) after typing the post, so the behaviour I suggest wouldn't always be possible. Well, hopefully you can discern what I mean!

@goob the proposal is supposed to mean completely remove the markup and leave just the plain text, no link or anything. of course the mentioned name would have to stay, otherwise the message would be distorted.

The problem with limiting input just from the UI is that it can always be circumvented... also, should we ever get an API (hopefully soon), we can't control what gets sent at all.

Thanks for clarifying that, Florian. (Probably just me being stupid.) That makes sense, and I agree with your proposal to make mentions plain text.

I think leaving the mention in the text is just fine, as @goob pointed out, mentioning someone from an Aspect they're not a part of can be very useful in talking about someone. D* does a pretty good job of correctly linking the user's profile on different pods, and I see no problem with linking to a user's profile via a mention.

If the mentioned user is out of scope of the post privacy, then the mentioned user probably shouldn't be notified about it.

How about adding the person who is mentioned to the aspect dropdown, so it would read:
2 Aspects, Sean Tilley
or
2 Aspects, 2 People
then they could be removed through there and not notified if they don't get the post.

Sean, of course it would be better to type a name in full, but since the advent of Twitter, people have been @naming each other all over the place where it doesn't work: blog comments, message boards, Facebook, probably even in emails and text messages for all I know. We can't stop people doing that, but I do agree that it's inappropriate to turn that usage into a link to the profile of someone who's not able to view the post because they're not included in the relevant aspect(s).

Hi Raphael! Long time no see. Hope all's well with you.

@raphaelsofaer interesting suggestion - and that is how it works with Google+ actually. I like that idea.

First however I think we should fix this bug (remove the mention completely or just not notify) - then we can improve on how aspects work.

It's a really annoying bug, sometimes getting a notification of a post and no way of seeing the actual post.

The solution of Raphael is probably the best, but also the hardest to implement. As I have no time to dev for the moment, it's up to you guys, but this has to be fixed quickly as it's a privacy leak.

Don't just agree to remove the mention completely if you want to change something later and it's only an intermediate step. "Never underestimate the livetime of a quick fix." So please think of it, how you could do it right now, so that there is not much to do until somebody really wants to improve it. And I think "just remove the mention" is not living up to our standards for user experience (at least not to mine).