What is a @here mention?

[ganncamp (G Ann Campbell)]

Stumbled across this in the settings:

But I can’t find a description of what a “here mention” actually does.

[JammyDodger]

Here’s the blurb from the announcement:

@jomaxro

@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.

I’m not 100% on what circumstance it’s useful for, but that’s what it does.

[ganncamp (G Ann Campbell)]

Thanks @JammyDodger! I was trying to figure it out because I just re-categorized a thread & updated its title & wanted to notify the folks who had participated. But without being sure what here did, I was afraid to use it.

And at a minimum, I suppose the description of the “here mention” field could be improved to something like:

Name used for @here mention to allow a privileged user to notify up to 10 people participating in the thread. Must not…

[JammyDodger]

I think that’s a good suggestion. It’s a bit tricky to search on meta for any guidance on it as the search doesn’t like the @here syntax, so having a small explainer in the options themselves would be useful.

[zogstrip]

Excellent idea

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/15912

[tobiaseigen]

Thanks for the feedback on the description of the setting! It’s still fairly new so the language can be refined a bit for clarity.

In your case I think it would be enough for you to just add a reply to the topic, and users who are involved in it and are watching/tracking it will be notified about your reply. The @ notification is noisier which you may not like to do too often anyway.

[ganncamp (G Ann Campbell)]

Okay then… what is the benefit/use of the here mention?

[tobiaseigen]

I’m not entirely sure - someone involved in adding the feature will need to chime in. But it’s likely related to Introducing Discourse Chat (PRE-ALPHA). In chat it is common to @here or @all when you want to get the attention of everyone in a channel.

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

Yeah it’s a very strange feature outside of chat IMO. But we are building chat now, so..

[Decorbuz]

Maybe it would be better for the @here mention to only work in Discourse Chat? Just my two cents…

[ClawdiaWolf (Claudia)]

@tobiaseigen

I’m not entirely sure - someone involved in adding the feature will need to chime in

Bit of an old topic but I can provide some insight.

On one of my instances we have a lot of users who have topics with frequent replies and don’t want to track them and set them to normal so they stay off Unread but will still show on Unseen.

We use it when we post in-topic moderator notes to make sure all participants in the thread see it. We upped the max number of users to notify to 50. We rarely have threads with that many participants but the ones where our mods tend to need to use it do.

I should also add we have it restricted to staff users to prevent it being abused.