Revisiting this topic:
- 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.