The discussion revolves around “mention noise” and a central dashboard for monitoring mentions across multiple Discourse instances. DeanMarkTaylor initially asked if the Discourse team has a method to prioritize mentions from team members amidst a large number of mentions from other users.
codinghorror expressed a desire for a list of just @name mentions, which riking revealed is already available in the backend but not displayed in the UI. riking then implemented a feature to add a “Mentions” tab to the user profile page, which was well-received.
The conversation also touched on the idea of upgrading Font Awesome, with sam advocating for an upgrade to avoid temporary hacks. codinghorror initially opposed the upgrade but later agreed it was a good idea.
sam questioned the use case for having a separate list for @mentions versus replies, while codinghorror explained that name mentions tend to be more about bringing someone’s attention to a topic, rather than conversational replies.
Mittineague and cpradio discussed how mentions are used to “ping” other members, drawing their attention to a topic. The conversation concluded with sam mentioning that upgrading Font Awesome would not happen for version 1.2 but would be worked on later.
###Mention Noise
I was just wondering if the Discourse team get @username mention noise?
I can see you guys use mentions between the Discourse Team to draw attention to things and effectively create a todo list.
Do you have a special method for this? Perhaps use of bookmarks.
I was thinking you guys would need a specific way of giving mentions by a Discourse Team member a higher priority if you got a lot of mentions from other users.
Or is this just a non-issue?
###Dashboard
If you are providing support for a lot of Discourse instances…
Do you have a central dashboard for monitoring “at mentions” from admins / moderators from across your commercially supported Discourse instances?
I can see a gap (product wise) where logging in with your Discourse ID into a Dashboard seeing activities from across the communities I’m involved which could be helpful.
One thing I wish we had is a list of just our @name mentions.
Note that @riking added a “view all” mode for notifications which lets you dig into very long notification lists via your profile page, and @cpradio (I think) added a dismiss all button there. These were very helpful changes in managing lots of notifications.
That would be useful. Even on our instance where I don’t necessarily get a lot of them, but when I do, it is important for me to follow up on it. So having a spot where I can specifically see who and where mentioned me, would give me a list I can work from.
I think mentions overlap with replies. we used to split up reply types and then we started merging them all together in a bundle to minimise confusion.
I wonder if it makes sense having replies and then allowing users to filter replies by what they will.
Also I wonder what the use case is for purely looking at @ mentions vs all replies.
Name mentions tend to be more “I need someone else from the outside to look at this topic” versus conversational replies to previous posts in the topic.
I noticed; the change removes that and separates them out. Now only “reply” and “quote” are in the replies tab, which is the same as what gets displayed in a topic.
