Question [Feature Request] Ability to tag/mention another user in posts

Hi,

Many other forum solutions allow you to tag/mention other users in your posts and that user will get an email/PM to say they have been mentioned.

E.g. I could type @username and that would generate the PM and email when the post was submitted.

It's a really useful feature if you want to draw the attention of another user to your post, maybe you are asking them for input or help on a topic.

I can't find any route to do this through extensions or plugins and it looks to have been asked for since Kunena 1.* onwards.

Chris

Hello,

It's something that i have in the mind, we have thought a bit about it in the past. In the fist time the users which can mentionned should be the people who are participated in the topic. You can show all the users available it will be slow...

This is a subject that has been mentioned several times over the past few years:

User Tagging: @username function (similar to Twitter) when mentioned in forum
Tagging users into posts

I would like to make three points:

1) Kunena is not Facebook or Twitter. If you want to send notifications to users (by email) when you mention them somewhere, Facebook and Twitter have these features.

2) I have not seen any web-based discussion forum (except for Facebook and Twitter, if you can describe these applications as discussion forums ) that has this kind of feature.

lightbulbwebdesign wrote: Many other forum solutions allow you to tag/mention other users in your posts and that user will get an email/PM to say they have been mentioned.

Name one.

3) No-one has offered to write this kind of feature for Kunena. I strongly doubt that this feature will become available in Kunena in the near future simply because no-one is prepared to invest the time to develop it.

Thanks for the reply. Having used and moderated a number of forums over the years, some with 100's of thousands of users, I disagree that this is a feature not needed because it exists elsewhere.

1) One forum was the largest car owners forum of its type for a specific brand of car. It was extremely useful to be able to tag people in posts as often you knew who would know the answer to a query so you could tag them and they'd get a notification through email and the forum as a pop-up (which could be turned off) and they'd know to check the thread/post. Without tagging you can't do this, you have to resort to PM which can sometimes keep the knowledge off the forum where it is useful to many others.

2) VBulletin, ProBoards to name but two. phpBB has an add-in to provide this feature.

3) I appreciate that, if I was in the position to consider it and had the skills to do so I would look at this myself.

It does not need to be complex, it does not even need to have any look-ups as you post/type.

Simply, if someone typed @lightbulbwebdesign (or any other desired code type) and submitted the post, the submission process could check and send the appropriate PM with a link to the post/thread in question, perhaps even generate an email to the user as well.

This is purely a feature suggestion, one which I personally used lots on forums I was not responsible for installing, notifications through Facebook and Twitter aren't really of any use within the forum, we want people to stay on the forum and be notified of a mention so they come back and visit it to answer the query, continue the conversation. It's a good method of keeping members involved if nothing else.

Thanks for the reply. Your forum signature is one reason why this feature would be beneficial as it removes the need to use PM's to ask questions to users who could better serve the communities on the forum by posting in-thread

"I don't provide support by PM, because this can be useful for someone else."

I really +1 this feature. Not sure if the message sent should be a PM: the normal (one time) notification message would suffice for me (the one you get when a reply is posted and you are subscribed to the topic).

Github also uses this functionality (not only for user names, but also for cross referencing other issues / topics, commits etc.) Works perfectly!

The fact facebook and twitter (and also linkedin) have this functionality is not a reason NOT to have it. The point in using a forum like Kunena for me is that it offers additional functionality (and ownership) that facebook and linkedin do not offer: but it is getting harder and harder to keep my users on the Kunena forum. Because everybody has the facebook / linkedin app it is very easy to follow up on discussion on these platforms > loosing interaction with the community members.

So the fact that Facebook and Linkedin have this functionality and it is cherished by the users is not a reason to not have it for Kunena but a reason to ALSO have this functionality.

For the end-users of the forum it really doesn't matter if they are on Kunena or another forum-flavor. In the end the success of your community is in the amount of interaction. If the users feel they are held back in the way that they are able to interact the interaction will slowly stop and shift to another platform. Facebook and Linkedin groups are slowly (?) defining the measure bar for this...

just my 2-cents

I'll drag this to the top, and mention that I would also like a @mention feature.

The feature should have option for email, PM or both types of notifications.

Are there any current plans to include this in Kunena?

-Lars

We have this on our Kunena forum. It just takes a component and a module and a few lines of code in the topic.php file.

@Bewellfarmer : is-it possible to know the name of the component and module which handle mentions ?

They are ones we developed for this reason. It has 3 icons so far. The first one is when someone tags your username like @xillibit@. We used 2 @s because some names have spaces and special characters. The second one is for replies to your thread or the next reply after you post. The third one is for Thank You notices. We plan on adding another icon to the notification bar for threads you are subscribed to replies. Also maybe favorited thread replies.