Notify users participating in a topic

Feature
1

Is there a way to notify all users who reply to a specific topic?

Something similar to the Slack’s @here or @channel

1 Like
2

No there is not. I’ve moved this to feature.

4 Likes
3

The Discourse equivalent should probably be @topic. Could be very useful for mods and admins, but I wouldn’t want it on by default for any lower trust level.

6 Likes
4

I think I would like this feature with 2 caveats.

  1. Default disabled for entire forum
  2. Ability to enable it per category

I can see it being very useful for internal discussions where people are not default watching.

The tricky thing though is that @here could mean

  1. People tracking topic or above + people who participated
  2. People who participated

And then there is the question of mutes which clearly should be bypassed.

4 Likes
5

Yeah I would wait on this feature, because there is already a much safer way to accomplish virtually the same goal – create a group and enable group mentions.

3 Likes
6

This should be safe assuming it’s only available to higher trust levels by default, like TL3.

I think there’s a legitimate use case for @here every time we are wrapping up a feature topic that got completed. UserVoice does the same thing, even with email send outs, when a feature story has concluded.

3 Likes
7

The verb is quite wrong and derived from chat presence – are those people really “here”? We’d need to start with better words.

8

Well my original suggestion was @topic, which I feel makes a lot of sense. IMO that is what the command should be, and we could hardcode @here to suggest @topic so that the chatty folks can catch on quick.

4 Likes
9

One slight issue I have here is that if you really cared you would watch the topic, so this indicates that we need some sort of mode where you do not care but we force the caring upon you

In other words, why is watching not good enough?

1 Like
10

I see what you mean, there is slim difference indeed between typing @topic and typing 4-5 different individual @name mentions… on a topic with 6 people, including yourself, it wouldn’t be crazy or particularly difficult to manually name mention everyone who participated in the topic. And that’s totally allowed.

Where it gets weird is when the topic has 20, 50, 100 people participating. Then we’d need to pop a REAL BIG warning about notifications, like we do for groups – or even disallow it entirely as too noisy. And possibly only staff could do a @topic mention, or very highly trusted users, similar to the caution we have by not allowing enormous @groupname notifications by default, unless the group owner enables it.

As long as it is off by default and has to be explicitly enabled by the site owners I don’t see much risk. I am a bit unclear where / how that would be enabled though. Per category doesn’t seem totally right?

1 Like
11

Just for documentation, this feature request was implemented a couple of months ago – see 2.8.0.beta9: Tag Descriptions, Recent Searches, Sticky Avatars, and more

@here support

Users can now mention @here to notify 10 people who replied to the topic. Admins can manage permission to use the @here mention, and the number of users mentioned, via the max_here_mentioned and min_trust_level_for_here_mention site settings.

3 Likes