As a user, I find it incredibly valuable to see many team members active on the public forum and also writing topics about feature requests, bugs… It makes them seem like regular users too, which is nice.
It also incites users to nudge or directly talk to these team members, which makes the users unintentionally overlook a particular “étiquette”.
This has been bugging me for 6 years now.
The étiquette that says we shouldn’t PM or mention a team member.
A mention is often edited and someone will post “please don’t mention team members,” which sometimes feels rude, and I don’t know how users are supposed to know that. Especially when other users (usually TL3+) can mention the team without being called out.
Instead of applying this out-of-the-blue rule, I think if team members want to restrict who can contact or mention them, they should set up a personal profile setting to only allow certain groups or users to contact them (PM & mentions). For example, trust level 3 minimum + theme and plugin authors + @arkshine, etc…
This would create a more welcoming environment, especially for newcomers.
There’s an official plugin that does a bit of this but lacks granularity, and my topic focuses on the mentioned etiquette on meta.
This may not be directly related to the topic, but I want to acknowledge this aspect.
I truly appreciate the team’s activity on the public forum. Their presence, knowledge, and expertise, beyond what Canapin mentioned, make you feel welcomed and supported in your Discourse experience, and you learn a lot as well.
I understand that allowing users to help each other is important, and the team’s active involvement creates a fantastic dynamic. It’s very enjoyable! Thanks to the team for taking the time.
Like Arkshine and Canapin, I have the same sentiments. I like that the Team are involved with the community as it makes you feel valued.
On other forums I’m on, there is also a ‘rule’ about tagging staff members. But the wording is ‘avoid’ doing to making it seem like in some cases you can? I like it when its black and white with rules/etiquette.
As for Meta, I can’t remember when I last mentioned a team member? I don’t always know who does what role wise, so etiquette aside, I wouldn’t feel confident mentioning team members let alone the right ones.
But my view, I don’t think mentioning staff for attention unless it’s important is good as there are lots of other people here who can provide an answer.
I found a relevant-ish post by Hawk on a similar matter asking about mentions.
Thanks for raising this – I do understand the sentiment, it is just a bit more nuanced than it may appear.
I don’t mind being tagged per se, but only under the circumstances that I mentioned in that post because notification fatigue is a real thing for us. I enjoy spending time on Meta but only when I have time to do it intentionally, so I rely on my notifications for urgent or important things, rather than general support questions which often require me to read back through a long topic to understand the context.
You’ll remember @Canapin that we also use Meta for supporting customers privately, although that isn’t obvious to most Meta users. Turning off the ability to notify me means that I would miss important requests. It’s not feasible to add a new group each time we add a new customer. If there are other workarounds you can think of, I’m willing to give them a go.
This might be a little off-topic, but we also use Discourse to support private customers and we do add a new group for each of them. So now as you’re saying that, is there a better way?
Otherwise I fully understand all the reasons and for me it’s magic that a CEO and other team members are active here like that. On this position you have so many notifications… And this is not an official support, “just” a community. And this community is so fast and Discourse is a profitable open-source. For me it’s a constant inspiration on how an open source project can work.
Sorry, I may have miscommunicated. We also add a group for each customer, but I don’t want to have to keep checking and adding new groups to my “can contact” list.
This is where maybe having a group made for community liaisons is a good idea that could be composed of team members and partners who might be interested in helping out.
I do appreciate that by volume why yous would not want everyone pinging team for everything under the sun. Also understandable in I presume special private categories for paying customers to have priority and even then by volume can be taxing.
Like others have said though either way do really appreciate the team’s interaction even under the current umbrella . As the interaction experience is imho 99.7% highly positive.
Now with Jam’s departure in the roll. Is it or was it okay to @mebtuon the community liaison as long as it is not being done needlessly? Is it still High? Perhaps a post with examples of when it is okay to poke the community liaisons? With example of inappropriate mentions.
I have been in the all in one position with 6000 family active members during a kislxkstarter for a company as a volunteer. So I do appreciate the burnout factor. As the company did have members on the mod team but were not moderator minded. So extremely rare for them to do any moderation if the forum. I was also a community liaison as they recognize the value of having a non company community member being a voice to represent and also guide the community.
Though they do once in awhile send me some products as appreciate. And even bumped me to admin to look after upgrading and such.
Thanks Dan, a community liaison group is a good idea. I’ll raise it with the team.
We are sharing the responsibility for managing Meta across our whole team, with Tobias/the Product team spearheading. We only began in the last couple of weeks so we’re finding our feet.
You’re quite welcome. All things take time. The trick on our end is to have the understanding and patience. Rome may not have been built in a day. But construction has started.
While I kinda instinctively avoid ‘mentioning’ team members in posts, I’ve done it at least a couple of times in a fit of urgency.
I’d like to take this opportunity to thank the team members I’ve mentioned in the past who’ve kindly responded without a tsk-tsk – but I won’t mention them here.
After the first nagging about mention a team member I haven’t mention anyone. It was the safest road, and I will keep that strategy.
But… I don’t even need mentions. I write in topics and sometimes I get answers, sometimes I don’t. Mention someone doesn’t change that. I might quote someone instead, because it does same thing. And I don’t even know who I would mention
My opinion still stays — a house full of coders could tie ability to mentions of team member to higher TL, because they know how not use is. And give a small informative message to (new) members who are trying to do such trick.
Because even I kind of understand these topics, it sounds a bit rude when (new) users are using tools that they have and they are used to use. No-mention is not common policy out there.
This could be automated if Discourse supported “second-order groups” (groups containing groups).
This touches on my deep interest in Discourse as a communication platform and digital garden for formal communities, such as a public school.
Discourse is very well optimized for public and informal communities. However, supporting formal communities requires the ability to implement detailed and granular permissions.
Determining which group is allowed to send PMs to members of another group is one such requirement.
In nearly all areas where global permissions (administrator, moderator, TLs) can be configured, there is a need for local permissions (members of a group).
Currently, supporting formal communities often depends on external tools for proper configuration. Introducing group arithmetic and second-order groups as the foundation of the permission system in Discourse would enable the implementation of these features directly within the platform.
If ever you think a topic needs moderator attention, use the flagging system. We really appreciate the help identifying problems so we can get started resolving them as quickly as possible.
You can also message @moderators anytime you have a question about moderation or feedback, or to alert us to a problem. One of us (likely me) will get back to you.
The Site feedback category is also a great place to give feedback and talk about how this community is organized and run. I really enjoy these conversations and try to be very responsive, and have already made alot of changes based on the suggestions here.
Beyond the above, the team is sensitive to @ mentions because of notification burnout. Hawk summed this up nicely above. Also, there is often a perceived mismatch about urgency and who should respond. For our open source product we provide community support here on the forum, and there are many people here who know the answers and are here anwering questions. To address this, I think we can do better:
as moderators, we do reserve the right to edit or remove posts when there is an issue. But when we do so we do need to be mindful that it can freak out the member. We can be kinder in our messaging to the member, by sending them a PM to tell them why we did it instead of publicly singling them out for what we perceive as misbehavior. (In some cases though it helps to do it publicly, to remind everyone of the rules)
take care to be sure that we are very gently reminding members in cases when not to @ mention, and when possible explain the reason why they didn’t need to do it. In most cases people who can answer are already in the conversation.
often inappropriate @ mentioning is accompanied by impatience and a sense of urgency that is also not appropriate. This can also be responded to with gentle reminders, with followup via direct PM so as not to clutter topics with moderator guidance.
I agree with Jagster that a just in time popup to slow down @ mentioning by new members is a good idea. Plugin territory if someone wants to take a stab at it!
soon we will relaunch our community support program, which will make it easier for everyone to identify the members in the community who are very knowledgeable about Discourse and whose answers we trust implicitly.
model the behavior we want to see. For example, in this post I am mentioning members because I want to refer to their posts in this topic, but I am not quoting or using the @ so they are not summoned to this topic unnecessarily. This is helpful for our team in particular because we all try to be extremely responsive when we are @ mentioned, because we use this site for customer support as well as community support.
Did you all disable notifications for posts being linked?
I ask because, in my view, there is hardly any difference between a quote and a link to the post. Both notify the author by default, and I find it difficult to tell whether it makes any difference to the individual whether I quote, so that what I am referring to is directly visible in the topic, or whether I link, so that one has to move to a different topic to read what I am referring to.
By the way, I agree that @mentions can be annoying - someone recently asked users if my answer helped them and @mentioned me in those questions .
But at the same time, @mentions are anonymized when you ask for your account to be anonymized. Cases where @ wasn’t used are not, which makes finding out the original username quite easy. For me, it often feels wrong to take this option to be easily anonymized away from the user.
I did not change anything to the notification settings. The notification icon is different for quotes vs mentions - when we see the @ in the notification menu we give it a high priority.
That said, we also try to be mindful not to quote excessively either in cases when the person we are quoting is not involved or doesn’t need to be brought into the current conversation.
Good to know you find that annoying! I can stop doing that.
That’s an interesting point. I hadn’t thought about that and I don’t know if there is a solution for it. I guess better to mention the full username and put backticks around it? eg @moin
So I am not sure if it’s worth trying anything here on Meta. There are so many usernames connected to posts in the AI summaries. Some manual mentions of usernames won’t add much to that.
I think you only did it one day; usually, you don’t use @mention in that case. Otherwise, I would have told you. Maybe you were in an @mention mood that day . And it was only annoying to check whether any of them were relevant. But in the context of the @team asking to avoid @mentions where you don’t need the person’s attention, it was quite surprising.
What about having @username~ that acts as a “silent mention” which suppresses notifications ? The tilde could even be removed from the cooked content so it would be visually the same. I don’t think this would be very hard to implement either.
I like the idea of an easier silent @mention than the current HTML option. Silent quoting could be possible, too.
Maybe a syntax similar to ?silent=true for links could also be added for quotes. Like the full:true parameter, a silent:true [quote="RGJ, post:17, topic:351280, full:true"]
we also try to be mindful not to quote excessively either in cases when the person we are quoting is not involved or doesn’t need to be brought into the current conversation.
I hadn’t really considered the impact of quoting on the “quotee” – probably because I’m not inundated, myself. I don’t mean to alert someone every time, just to provide a link to the full post. Maybe a “quiet quote” option on the popup would make this easier:
I love how a conversation about etiquette turns so quickly into a product brainstorm.
These ideas are quite good. The silent mention and silent quote ideas are worth going deeper on in a Feature topic. I like the idea of being able to mention someone so their username can still be clicked on to see their user card, while not notifying them. Same thing with quotes - it is helpful to have the quote functionality in place to refer back to the quoted post, but we don’t always want to notify the user being quoted.
All that said I suspect this is very much a meta problem. Most communities have the opposite requirement. They need these notifications to stimulate more engagement and encourage people to come back and continue the conversation when they are mentioned or quoted.
And, returning to the OP, even here on meta I think norm setting is “good enough”. We have trust in the community not to overuse @ mentioning. In the rare case that it happens, we can (gently and kindly!) nudge the probably new member to please not do that.
. As the interaction experience is imho 99.7% highly positive.
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. And it was only annoying to check whether any of them were relevant. But in the context of the 
