Mention behaviour

How feasible would it be to write code to do the following?

Assume I type a message and @-mention Fred Bloggs, who is in my 'Friends' aspect, but then select 'Family' from my aspects list. Fred is not part of my Family aspect.

When I press the Share button, a dialog pops up:

'You can only @-mention people in the aspect(s) to which you are posting. You are sharing this post with only your Family aspect, but are attempting to @-mention Fred Bloggs, who is in another aspect. If you wish this @-mention to remain, press Edit and add the aspect relevant for that person to the post. If you press Continue, the post will be shared only with your Family aspect, and the @-mention of Fred Bloggs will be removed.'

This alerts the user to what possibilities there are, and what will happen if they proceed with their post. The dialog would need to fetch information on which aspect(s) the person being @-mentioned is in; or, you could keep the language more general and just refer to different aspects without naming them.

Have no knowledge of coding so apologies if this is a really unworkable suggestion.

I’d also be interested to know from people who vote to retain the @-mention of someone not in the aspect to which a post is made, how they think it’s acceptable that there will be a link to that person’s profile visible to a (perhaps large) number of people in a post which they will be unable to view, which they will not know about, and therefore will not be able to ask to be removed if they don’t want it.

E.g. someone could, theoretically, post malicious things such as ‘@fredbloggs is a paedophile’, which various people would see, with a link to Fred Blogg’s profile, but Fred would know nothing about this.

I think @-mentions are only acceptable where they provide a two-way link: there is a link in the post for people to follow to that person’s profile, and conversely that person is alerted to their name being used and can view the post. Otherwise it has potentially dangerous implications.

The way I see it, with the way we currently advertise aspects, we have a serious privacy problem. For the present model of sharing, we need to fix this issue (most probably in one of the ways I outlined in the description).
I would also go ahead and implement the way we shall decide, so that pods, that choose to backport those kinds of fixes can do so.

However, I also have no problem if afterwards we decide to revamp the sharing model altogether, which we should discuss and vote on in a different thread.

... I really just wanted to know how to fix a technical defect here, not stir up a completely new discussion. It's nice, if that happened, but the technical issue remains.
:)

Wait, Goob. If this is your argument, then we should disable the possibility to write hyperlinks as well, because they point at something/someone without notifying this thing/person about it. Do you really think that this is a privacy issue?

I don't see anything potentially dangerous implications about letting an @-mention point at someone without notifying this person. That's exactly the same as if I was writing a hyperlink in markdown.

I don't think there's an equivalence, Rasmus, because although a Diaspora profile is displayed as a web page, it is in nature more like an email address than an 'ordinary' web page. The majority of web pages are open, 'published' pages intended to be read by anyone; a profile is less so. I can't put it clearly at the moment, but there is, to me, a difference between linking to someone's profile and linking to an 'ordinary' web page.

In any case, we're talking about mention behaviour, which is by its nature a means of alerting someone to a discussion. If this doesn't happen in an instance because the person mentioned is not a part of the aspect(s) to which the post has been made, it should not be possible to mention that person, because by allowing the poster to mention a person, it gives the person the impression that that person will be notified of that mention. It's confusing, and doesn't do what it should do in this instance.

So no mentions where the person mentioned wouldn't be notified - but if you want to provide a link to that person's profile in secret, you could still do that as a hyperlink. At least in that case the person doing it would know exactly what it was that they were doing.

I set an outcome to the proposal. I should be able to work on the implementation within a week.

Thanks, Florian. If I understand your outcome correctly, it will allow people to mention someone even when that person cannot see the post. This to me is problematic, and deserves further discussion - and the motion was only swung by one vote, so not a convincing majority.

I wouldn't be happy for someone to be able to mention me if I were unable myself to view that mention - whether it's a 'regular link' or a 'mention link'. (I'm not sure what the difference is, apart from the notification.) Indeed, I'd rather be notified so I could at least then ask the person to remove the link if I wanted, rather than have no idea there was this link to my profile.

I think the better thing would be either:
- allow the mention (and notification) so at least the person mentioned knows that they have been mentioned,
or
- stripping out the hyperlink completely.

I think that transforming it to a 'regular link' is the worst outcome, because that way there would still be a link to my profile, which I wouldn't be able to see and wouldn't even know if its existence. And I don't feel this was the outcome of the vote, either.

I may well have misunderstood you. But if I have understood correctly, I think it needs further discussion about the issues (which are quite important, I think) before taking such action.

Best wishes.
Goob

We have a real issue here that needs to be fixed asap. The most simple solution with the least implications is to strip it. That doesn't mean it has to be the answer for ever. But it's the answer for the moment.

So I'm tempted to reopen the proposal and ask to vote for an intermediate solution. And after that we can discuss what the ideal behavior should be.

That's a good idea, Jonne, and I support it.

Florian said I'll work on the definitive solution in a week. We'll not release a hotfix before that, so what's the benefit of an intermediate solution?