Limit ability to tag/mention certain users

I am not part of the talkyard team in any way. just sharing my personal opinion on this:

I think this is a good point to ask yourself and your team: "why are they tagging me in the first place?"

If people reach out to you directly, it usually means the common customer experience is suffering.

• Either you are answering faster, better, more attentive, more polite...
• Maybe you (or your team) are not visiting the blog often enough, and they get a faster response when tagging you?

So instead of blocking this feature, and thereby forcing your users into a bad customer experience, I think it is better to leave this open so that every time a user is not satisfied with other people's work, you can at least hear about it.

But either way, the place to change these settings is in the user preferences:

• Your team should change their settings to "Every Post" for the categories they are responsible for, to make sure users dont feed the need to tag people in posts in the first place.
• You can change your preference to "Hushed". People will still be able to tag you, but you wont receive a notification.

view your profile -> preferences -> notifications

restrict the ability to tag certain users from our leadership team so that only members of a particular group can tag those restricted accounts

The people in the leadership team, they don't happen to all of them be Core Members or moderators?
If so, maybe initially, configuring a minimum trust level for someone to be allowed to @-tag you, could be enough.

Alternatively, Talkyard could, for each user group G, remember which other user groups is allowed to tag the users in G. I suppose that in an initial implementation, only admins could edit these settings. — This would be a lot more work.

It's important that someone who tries to mention an "un-mentionable" user, realizes that s/he cannot do that. So, when trying to mention an un-mentionable user, his/her name wouldn't appear at all in the mentions username list (which appears when one types "@..."). Or the name could appear, but grayed out and with the text "Mentions disabled". And the @mentioned_username would not get converted to a clickable link, once saved.

I've been thinking: What if, when one submits a post, or edits it, one got to see which people would get mention-notified? Then:

• One can be sure that one hasn't misspelled a mention.
• When editing a post and adding a new @username_mention, it can be nice to see that "Ok, also when editing a post, @mentions work, not only when submitting it the first time". (I still don't know how GitHub works in this regard. To add a new username mention to a GitHub comment, I actually copy the text from my original comment, delete the comment, and re-post it with the new @mention added, just because I don't know if it works to add a new @mention via and edit.)

Such a who-will-get-mentioned list would not be a modal dialog — it'd be an unobtrusive info line above or below the editor, just for those who wanted to have a look. Maybe next to "Saving draft ...".

Maybe such a who-will-get-@mention-notified feature could, if typing @christian, show a message like: "Christian will not get notified — mentions are disabled for this user". What do you think

Working with this now. (Any latest date when ideally this should be available?)

B.t.w. two old related topics:

Status update: Code review done. Next, I'll build one new version with just the database migrations, that'll be v0.2022.13. And another version, v0.2022.14, with the application source code changes.

In this way, if there's any bug, one can rollback to the previous version (v0.2022.13), which in itself has no effect.