I’m trying to understand the details about how @mentions work. This has been a little dynamic over the years, and it isn’t clear anywhere what the current functionality actually is.
As far as I can tell with my own trial and error:
@mentions fire off a single notification
they don’t change the watching / tracking status of a Topic for the user (but they used to)
I don’t remember that this ever happened to me, and I can only find a topic suggesting that feature Preference: Automatically Watch Topic when I am @mentioned, quoted, or invited. Can you narrow down the time frame a little bit?
I’m sure it used to, and I’m sure I observed it being a big headache for many here on Meta.
I recall having to switch any topic where I was mentioned back to ‘normal’ or ‘tracking’ manually, which was very tedious!!
But I’m a bit uncertain if I am hallucinating, or the functionality changed:
Certainly I have been doing things wrong recently as I expected it to bump people up to watching. Explains a lot of flat engagement!!!
I think this might be the case. It’s the other way around: setting a topic to tracking/watching will get you those mentions, so maybe you just drew the wrong conclusion?
Maybe it was the preference of automatically watching topics you are assigned to and Assigns by staff mention that resulted in the topic being watched after an @mention. 