Better Group Message notification visual differentiation

Right now, when receiving notifications from mentions, there is not an immediate visual indicator as to whether it is a personal message or a group message.

You can mouse over the @ icon to see Mention or Group Mention, but that requires a mouse and direct interaction. Could something be done to the icon to show visually that one is a group mention?

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Visual mockup of what you would prefer?

I’ve been thinking about this since I made the post…I am really not sure what I would suggest.

Is fa-users used anywhere at the moment?

Edit: Or something like this (warning, I threw this together in 5 minutes in Photoshop, not perfect by any means):
Iconic:

Full size:

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As an end user in @Seth_Godin workshops, we partake in heavy use of @ mentions.

What would be super awesome great is a visual distinction in the notifications dropdown (and on the notifications page) between when I’m personally mentioned vs when my group is mentioned.

At present, the only way to tell is to click into the notifications page and then hover over them one at a time.

Being able to just scroll and look would provide alot of time saved and open threads to the server.

Consider this scenario:

PersonA @ mentions me in a sub-conversation quote where we had been deep in it
PersonA also @ mentions a group I’m in

The next day I’m scrolling my mentions, and all I see is @ and who made the mention.

Invariably I will click the wrong one. Since I can’t “reset” a notification, I’m then opening a separate tab to get back to the conversation and using up system threads unnecessarily.

Then multiply that situation by a 20 person group.

Consider if the dropdown had a simple distinguishing symbol

@
!@

doesn’t matter, just something to make it clear I am being summoned for my awesomeness vs “hey group, let’s collaborate!”

It would really help prioritize and focus how I tackle the mentions list. I imagine this would benefit lots of users across the board.

thanks for your time in considering this notion
and thanks for an amazing product!

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I wonder if this has a really simple solution, like if the CSS class for the notifications are different depending on group or personal alert.

Because then all you’d need to do is add one line of CSS that gave the group notification a different distinguishing feature. Maybe replace the icon with a group icon.

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This is a good idea, because you’re right, there is a pretty large difference between

hey @MichelleBasey what do you think of this?

Versus

can anyone in the @guides group assist me with this?

So the mentions list should probably have some glyph that makes the connotation between an individual mention and a group mention distinct, if possible. What do you think @awesomerobot?

It could be as easy as having that alternate glyph, or perhaps even relying on a different color (like a lighter grey) for a group mention? :thinking:

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Hello Joshua,

I don’t know if it’s current yet but I think something like this for group mention.
This is a simple @ inside g, means group mention.

group-mention

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A change was merged a few days ago!

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/931d8725de297a6abae68dbb7b953b319558c767

It now looks like this:

image

We use the Users icon, the name of the user who created the mention, as well the group that was mentioned.

For comparison, a regular mention looks like this.

image

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@jordan-vidrine I overall love the change but I feel like the grey background on the mention fights with the blue highlight. Maybe we skip that for these lines?

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this has been making me so so happy ever since I first saw it in my notifications list

thank you, Thank You, THANK YOU!!!

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Appreciate the thanks, but I’m just the messenger. Jordan did all the hard work.

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