Description of need:
At present whilst users are not clearly notified about disagreeing IDs and comments inside IDs it’s incumbent on the identifier to tag in the user if they wish to make them aware of a conflicting ID.
This is significant extra work for the identifier though and could be made easier through 1 or 2 alterations.
Even after typing 6 characters, the name of the OP doesn’t come up.
It would greatly speed up the work of identifiers if they could more easily tag in observers.
I imagine this is even more difficult for users with dyslexia to navigate the unique string the observer uses, so it’s an accessibility issue as well.
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Feature request details:
It would be better if there was some weighting towards the users involved in the observation when selecting the suggestion. In this instance, I feel like even typing @w should instantly trigger a suggestion for the OP and it doesn’t
Alternatively, we could make it so that something like @@ automatically tags the observer
Not sure if this is programmatically possible without breaking the existing link,… but it could be that one could drag and drop the users name and it gives you an @ tag … at present it just gives you a URL for their profile.
All suggestions made by @malcolmstorey!
I am just posting on his behalf
@sbushes I merged your request into this existing one because I think it’s substantially similar, but you/@malcolmstorey have some concrete suggestions to add.
It is also possible to @mention a random string with a typo, since iNat does not check if there IS a profile in that name - but here in the Forum @mentioning works as expected. Also lots of user ‘names’ are a random string, which must make it unnecessarily difficult for dyslexics. It seems that some people choose their iNat user name as if it were a password - and either never @mention. Or are deliberately obstructing for Do NOT @mention meee47***, thank you.
I have been quite vocally against previous proposals to make it easier to @-mention users indiscriminately, because there are too many people already who waste my time by @-mentioning top IDers on every single observation or without checking the specific expertise of those being mentioned. I thought from the title that this was another such proposal.
However, I am definitely in favor of a mechanism that would allow one to more easily enter the names of users who have already participated in the observation in some way. This is just good sense – there are often good, legitimate reasons for needing to get the attention of a user who has already shown an interest in the observation. (I will note that sometimes @-mentioning may generate superfluous additional notifications in such cases, if the user in question is already subscribed to the observation as a result of their activity on it.)
Well, if they don’t type my username correctly then I don’t get a notification, so overuse of mentioning is not a problem in such a case.
I don’t quite understand why you are quoting me here; as I noted, I support this feature request, just not making mentioning easier in general. People earlier in this thread have mentioned multiple legitimate reasons why entering a username is not necessarily simple (not all user names are easy to parse; common names may require typing quite a long string before the name that one wants shows up; etc.). If you think these reasons would not justify facilitating mentioning users in the particular situation requested here (i.e. users who have previously interacted with the observation), please explain why.
I’ll add that it can be quite challenging to type in user names if one happens to be using the android app because once the dialogue box is open to add a comment I can’t see the previous comment or ID with the username of the person I want to respond to, so I have to remember the user name or copypaste it or wait until I am back on my computer, by which time I may have forgotten which observation I wanted to respond to.
In your post pre-edit, you quoted a portion of my post out of context (suggesting that my position on this specific feature request was something other than what it is). You then followed this with a comment that had nothing to do with the quoted content.
I also don’t understand why you found it necessary to come back to the thread nearly a year later merely to say I should have understood why you were quoting me.
I am guessing that your underlying motivation is your annoyance at being tagged too often and that a recent experience of over-tagging led you to wish to reiterate your dislike of this practice. If so, I suggest you read my original response to you about the fact that this feature request is not about overuse of tagging and is unlikely to result in an increase in the sort of tagging you dislike.
I would also reiterate that if your concern is getting too many tags, quoting or responding to a comment of mine on some other, tangentially related topic is completely beside the point, as I am neither the person responsible for the tags you are getting nor can I do anything to prevent them.
All you are doing is generating irrelevant forum notifications for me (and for others who might be reading this thread). If you want to express your dislike of indiscriminate tagging or suggest ways to prevent it, there are doubtless other threads that would be more appropriate.
It might, however, make sense for the requester or a moderator to edit the title of this topic to better reflect the intention of the request, since it is not about making @-mentioning easier in general, but rather about responsive @-user name suggestions based on who has interacted with a particular observation
