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.
어떤 주제가 중재자의 주의를 필요로 한다고 생각되면, 플래깅(신고) 시스템을 사용해주세요. 문제를 식별하는 데 도움을 주셔서 감사하며, 이를 통해 가능한 한 빨리 해결을 시작할 수 있습니다.
중재나 피드백에 관한 질문이 있거나, 문제를 알려줄 일이 있을 때 언제든 @moderators에게 메시지를 보낼 수 있습니다. 우리 중 한 명(아마도 저일 겁니다)이 회신드리겠습니다.
Contribute > Site feedback 카테고리도 피드백을 주고 이 커뮤니티가 어떻게 조직되고 운영되는지에 대해 이야기하기 좋은 곳입니다. 저는 이런 대화를 정말 즐기고 있으며, 매우 적극적으로 대응하려 노력하고 있고, 이곳의 제안들을 바탕으로 이미 많은 변경 사항을 적용했습니다.
위 내용 외에도, 팀은 알림 피로감(notification burnout) 때문에 @ 멘션에 민감합니다. Hawk가 위에서 이 점을 잘 요약해 주셨습니다. 또한, 시급성에 대한 인식과 누가 응답해야 하는지에 대한 불일치가 종종 발생합니다. 저희 오픈 소스 제품은 이 포럼에서 커뮤니티 지원을 제공하며, 답을 알고 있는 많은 분들이 여기 계시며 질문에 답하고 있습니다. 이 문제를 해결하기 위해, 저희는 더 잘할 수 있다고 생각합니다:
중재자로서, 문제가 있을 때 게시물을 수정하거나 삭제할 권리를 보유합니다. 하지만 그렇게 할 때, 이것이 회원에게 큰 스트레스를 줄 수 있다는 점을 염두에 두어야 합니다. 저희가 인지하는 부적절한 행동으로 회원을 공개적으로 지적하는 대신, 왜 그렇게 했는지 알려주기 위해 개인 메시지(PM)를 보내는 방식으로 회원에게 더 다정하게 메시지를 전달할 수 있습니다. (다만, 규칙을 모두에게 상기시켜 주기 위해 공개적으로 하는 것이 도움이 되는 경우도 있습니다.)
@ 멘션을 하지 말아야 할 경우에 대해 회원들에게 매우 부드럽게 상기시켜 주시고, 가능하다면 왜 그렇게 할 필요가 없었는지 이유를 설명해 주세요. 대부분의 경우, 답할 수 있는 사람들은 이미 대화에 참여해 있습니다.
부적절한 @ 멘션은 종종 인내심 부족과 적절하지 않은 시급감 감정을 동반합니다. 이에 대해서도 부드러운 상기 메시지로 대응하고, 주제에 중재자 가이드라인이 가득 차지 않도록 개인 메시지(PM)를 통해 후속 조치를 취할 수 있습니다.
Jagster의 의견에 동의합니다. 신규 회원의 @ 멘션을 적시에 팝업으로 늦추는 것은 좋은 아이디어입니다. 누군가 시도해 보고 싶다면 플러그인 영역입니다!
곧 커뮤니티 지원 프로그램을 재개할 예정이며, 이를 통해 Discourse에 대해 매우 잘 알고 있고 저희가 신뢰하는 답변을 제공하는 커뮤니티 내 회원들을 식별하는 것이 모든 사람에게 쉬워질 것입니다.
우리가 보고 싶은 행동을 본보기로 보여주세요. 예를 들어, 이 게시물에서 저는 이 주제에서 그들의 게시물을 참조하고 싶기 때문에 회원들을 언급하고 있지만, 인용하거나 @를 사용하지 않아 그들이 불필요하게 이 주제로 소집되지 않도록 하고 있습니다. 이는 특히 저희 팀에게 도움이 되는데, 고객 지원뿐만 아니라 커뮤니티 지원에도 이 사이트를 사용하기 때문에 @ 멘션을 받으면 매우 적극적으로 대응하려 노력하고 있기 때문입니다.
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:
제안하신 아이디어들이 꽤 좋습니다. '무음 멘션’과 ‘무음 인용’ 아이디어는 Contribute > Feature 토픽에서 더 깊이 다룰 가치가 있습니다. 상대방에게 알림을 보내지 않으면서도, 사용자를 클릭해서 사용자 카드를 볼 수 있도록 멘션할 수 있는 아이디어가 좋습니다. 인용도 마찬가지입니다. 인용된 게시물을 다시 참고할 수 있도록 인용 기능을 유지하는 것이 유용하지만, 항상 인용된 사용자에게 알림을 보내고 싶지는 않죠.
하지만 솔직히 말하면, 이는 메타(meta) 차원의 문제라고 생각합니다. 대부분의 커뮤니티는 정반대의 요구사항을 가지고 있습니다. 멘션이나 인용이 되었을 때 사람들이 다시 돌아와 대화를 이어가도록 자극하고 참여도를 높이기 위해 이러한 알림이 필요하거든요.
그리고 OP(원문)로 돌아가서 말하자면, 여기 메타에서도 규범 설정만으로도 '충분하다’고 생각합니다. 커뮤니티가 @멘션을 과도하게 사용하지 않을 것이라고 신뢰하고 있습니다. 드물게 그런 일이 발생하면, 아마도 신규 멤버일 가능성이 높은 그 사람에게 (부드럽고 친절하게!) 그렇게 하지 말아 달라고 살짝 권고할 수 있습니다.
. As the interaction experience is imho 99.7% highly positive.
. And it was only annoying to check whether any of them were relevant. But in the context of the 
