I could've sworn it used to, but I guess it doesn't. This would be good to have.
Heck, not just good- we need it. How else are we going to contact @PopeFrancis?
@Liv then ban them. Although that might involve the forums actually being moderated.
"Just ban them" is great and all... after it happens. How do you stop it from being abused in the first place tho
Far better than this IMO would be being able to follow specific threads and getting notifications for posts in those threads (and sure this could be abused too, and sort of already is in game forums, but it's a lot easier to prevent excessive forum spam than to prevent excessive @'ing within forum posts). That way it's entirely opt-in per thread, and you can't get a random notification from a random thread you don't care about because someone mentioned you for no particular reason, either not knowing it gives a notification, or just not caring. Also means if someone was trying to harass you specifically with forum posts, they'd have to try to guess which threads you're actually following, which takes way more effort than just posting "@ person" literally anywhere.
Or y'know, in extreme cases like those we could just get a blacklist feature to stop receiving notifications from @ mentions from certain people (like an ignore function of sorts). Seems a bit more cost-effective than making users have to follow every single thread they might be interested in due to there being a few bad apples out there.
In case things got really bad (and we'd talking about a "youtuber fanbase raid mentioning me everywhere" kind of level), we could also get an option to toggle @ mention notifications off, which should fit right in with the other notification settings.
Maybe it should only give 1 notification per post, even if I @ the person multiple times, so saying, "@Lor @Lor @Lor @Lor @Lor @Lor @Lor @Lor @Lor @Lor @Lor @Lor @Lor @Lor @Lor " would give 1 notif And if the user decides to make multiple posts in a row, each only containing @Lor, that's something that our spam detector should pick up on
@MrMonsh I mean there are other benefits to being able to follow threads, and I feel like that would be a feature we'd want anyway regardless of whether this mention thing exists or not.
And yes, I would absolutely hope it could be blocked or disabled, I'd even want it to be disabled by default tbh. It would be an objectively bad feature without those options. But I also feel like if the options to avoid getting spammed are "block everyone that bothers you" or "don't use the feature"... maybe there's a better way to get what you're looking for.
@ShikenNuggets I never meant to say that there's no merit in a "Thread Follow" feature (in fact, I find it very interesting myself), but I think having to follow a thread first in order to get @ mention notifications defeats the purpose of this suggestion: if I get tagged in a thread, no matter where, I'd like to be notified about it.
While the mentions can be spammed/abused (as mentioned above), I fully expect there to be more benign cases rather than trolls, which is why I believe a blacklist should cover that for the most part. I won't deny it'd probably suck to have to resort to those measures, but then again I consider these to be edge cases rather than the norm, so it should prove to be fine.
And yes, getting only 1 notification per post (no matter the amount of mentions in it) is absolutely necessary to avoid getting flooded.