Tag users in posts using the @user syntax

Email notifications to mentioned users

On-Site Notifications plugin integration

I’d like to compare Q2A with StackOverflow.com, which is the kind of platform I believe Q2A should aim to become, and try to see what makes it better to steal some ideas. Clearly, user mentions, in the form of @user, with a UI-friendly solution came up so I decided to create a nicely looking plugin that would take care of this.

This should sum everything up:

The animated sequence shows how typing an @ character followed by a couple of additional characters triggers the display of a popup to select users. The admin can configure this popup to be filled with only the users involved in the question thread or every user in the site.

Mentioning a user not only creates a link to the user’s profile but also can notify them about the mention. The admin can configure two kinds of notifications. One is an email notification. The other one is a notification by means of the On-Site Notifications plugin. This notification system is very useful when trying to involve other users into a thread.

One additional feature that is worth mentioning is that the admin can set a minimum user level that will be allowed to create mentions to other users. That way the admin can restrict the feature just to Editors and above.

Here is a complete list of features:

• Easily transform a username into a clickable link when writing a post (mention)
• Users can be selected from a popup list of matched users
• An additional user field can be displayed in the popup (e.g. the full name of the user)
• Mentions can be used in questions, answers and comments
• Full and basic editors can be selected for each kind post
• On-Site Notifications plugin integration that allows receiving a notification to mentioned users
• The admin can choose to enable sending email notifications to mentioned users
• User permits can be configured to allow a minimum user level allowed to generate mentions
• Does not require any core hack and does not modify the core tables structure