How will users intuitively know how to mention a category?

[Canapin (Coin-coin le Canapin)]

I got a personal message from a user that asked me how I wrote such a thing: support.

That seems a very legitimate question since the # is no more displayed. They can’t deduce it from other users’ previous messages anymore.

[JammyDodger]

I think someone mentioned this in this topic as well the other day:

@_diondiondion

For what it’s worth, and feel free to call me old-school, but to me the new design lacks the # as a clear identifier of what it is that I’m looking at. The # is an obvious way to teach people how to create a link like that yourself, and you’ve removed it and replaced it with an icon that tells you more about the target, but less about the nature of the link.

I’d keep the # and add the icon to the end of the hashtag instead. This way you’ll be enhancing them without obscuring them.

[awesomerobot (Kris)]

Yeah discoverability is a little bit of an issue, I think we eventually want to move to a consistent “one shortcut for everything” which we’ve seen in some other apps. So rather than having @ # or / work for different things… we’d end up with one shortcut that can be used for users/categories/tags etc.

Google Docs is a good example… they use @ and you can search for all types of things:

This could work for us, because mentioning people is fairly intuitive and common… so once you’ve done that you can discover all the other available functionality.

[Jagster (Jakke Lehtonen)]

@awesomerobot

This could work for us

I agree. I would like to use #-sign but (hash)tags are really familiar to me. Ordinary Jane and John Does from social media background… not so much. Or they are misusing tags big time

Could it be both, @ and #? I mean something similar how we can alter searching using in: etc — @ would be general one showing everything and # is limited to tags.