Request: @mentions

[multani7871]

@mention similar to functionality in github @SachaG

[SachaG]

That would be great, but it's not trivial to implement. I'll think about it :)

[multani7871]

Thanks!

[jamiewilson]

Hey @SachaG and @multani7871. This would be such an amazing feature! I'd love to help out in any way I can. I'll look around and see if anyone's done this with meteor yet.

Just gonna leave some links here for reference too:

• twitter-text-js Extraction Examples
• How to pull @ mentions with javascript - stackoverflow
• At.js
• podio/jquery-mentions-input

[threehex]

Agreed. Would be amazing.

[SachaG]

Doing a full implementation with live autocomplate as you type like on GitHub seems like it would require a lot of work.

But a simpler version where usernames are autolinked server-side should be easier. I'm not familiar with regexp at all though, so I'm not sure how to go about finding and replacing the mentions inside the text…

[Sivli-Embir]

Just throwing this out here but if you want to fetch usernames client side I would recommend easy-search. Just store an array of usernames on the post for everyone who commented, and the poster. I believe thats actually how GitHub does it but with repositories. We could even go beyond and merge the client side query with a longer server side search. Then a simple charCode == 64 keypress for live autocomplete.

[SachaG]

But then it would only autocomplate from among the users participating in the thread. GitHub seems to be smarter than that (maybe your friends? or people who have commented on the repo?).

Telescope is already publishing all these users when you're on a thread page by the way.

[Sivli-Embir]

I don't think Github is actually smarter. I just tried a mention in an old repository with no issues and got no results other then the organization @owners, which contained only me. Now twitter gives you absolutely everyone, but thats its job so...

Easy search can scan the full user collection server-side and returns results quite quickly. So maybe after you type three characters then it starts server search? Maybe its overkill but I think we can do it, but should we.

[jamiewilson]

Just my two cents here. As far as a first implementation of this feature, I'd be really happy with at-mentions even if there wasn't search/auto-completion involved. Converting mentions to links and sending notifications to those mentioned would be awesome—even if it converted non-usernames to links as well.

On the other hand, another first step might be adding a simple select box to post and reply forms containing a list of all usernames so that you could "tag" one or more people, then triggering a notification.

[niallobrien]

I like how Gitter does it. @ brings up a list of participants and it does type ahead on your input.

[xavxyz]

Hey folks, I created a new issue with some guidelines on how we could do this for Nova : #1457

This issue is a good oldie, if someone wants to get their hands dirty on this, I guess it can be a lot of fun!

Closing this (oldest Telescope) issue, happy hacking 🔥