Forum: Why can't some forum-members be addressed with @?

[Friksel]

Hi, Some people can't be addressed from inside messages on the forum by using @, even people with no weird characters in their names.

Why is that? And how to address those people with an @ ?

Thanks in advance!

[Alfred]

I’ve never seen that here, @Friksel, but (as far as I’m aware) quoting a user’s post should always work as a way of ‘tagging’ them.

[Friksel]

5 minutes ago, Alfred said:

I’ve never seen that here, @Friksel, but (as far as I’m aware) quoting a user’s post should always work as a way of ‘tagging’ them.

I've had it several times lost months now. Normally after typing @ we get a list of people matching the characters we type after the @ , but sometimes the name just doesn't show up, even if you copy the name directly from the profile (and made sure it's plain text first). I understand quoting works as a way to tag, but quoting is pretty buggy on this forum and messes up the message field for some odd reason so I try to avoid it if I don't want to quote.

[Frozen Death Knight]

My problem with the @ system personally is that it doesn't take into account the people who have already written in a thread when sorting them. So if I would @ someone like @Alfred, I would have type his whole name before I get that as my first option, or go down into the list to search. Granted, his name is not the trickiest to find on the list, but I've had some occassions where it takes a while to find the right one.

[Alfred]

1 minute ago, Friksel said:

sometimes the name just doesn't show up, even if you copy the name directly from the profile (and made sure it's plain text first)

I don’t think I’ve ever managed to get names to show up by copying and pasting!

3 minutes ago, Friksel said:

quoting is pretty buggy on this forum and messes up the message field

I’m not aware of having encountered that particular problem.

[Friksel]

12 minutes ago, Alfred said:

I don’t think I’ve ever managed to get names to show up by copying and pasting!

I’m not aware of having encountered that particular problem.

Haha, are we on the same forum?

That quoting is a very well known bug here, also mentioned by other people. It happens especially if you're moving quotes in your post. They are pretty stuborn to move and sometime they prevent you from adding new lines before them and such things. They are pretty inflexibel to say the least......... and funny... cause while I'm typing this suddenly I am not allowed to enter a 'new line' (line feed) here. And that's definitely a problem of this forum. I really like the looks and functionalities on this forum, but the supplier should really come up with some bugfixing here and there.

[edit] Yes. If I post my message and re-edit it again, I am allowed to enter line feeds again. Weird.

To the copy and pasting of names: I wrote that I always write a name manually after the @ , so that should work, but it doesn't show the name in the list and neither does it show the blue highlight to communicate the name is understood as a forum member in some cases. And only than I copy and paste the forum members name after a @  , which also doesn't get recognised. And to make the forum trigger the recognision I do one backspace to delete the last character of the pasted name and retype it again, to hopefully trigger the system to find it. But it never works. Once a name is not recognised, whatever I do, it doesn't seem to get recognised with whatever I try.

[Alfred]

If I type @ followed by the first four characters of your username or mine, I invariably see the expected name on the list (usually in second place, I think).

I can’t really comment on the difficulty of moving quotes, because I mostly post from my iPad and I kind of expect such things to be a little bit tricky on touch-enabled devices.

[Friksel]

I appreciate your attempts to help @Alfred. For some reason you never seem to have experienced the issue of not having the name in the list of the person to address. Which is great for you For some reason I had it several times now. But at least most of the usernames work

[Alfred]

2 minutes ago, Friksel said:

For some reason I had it several times now. But at least most of the usernames work 

Which ones consistently fail? 

[Friksel]

33 minutes ago, Alfred said:

Which ones consistently fail? 

Don't know a name now, had the problem these days a few times, but can't remember the exact names anymore. Did some different posts. I'm gonna keep track of it now and let you know if I know.

[Friksel]

Alright @Alfred, I was just about to react to JoelSP in another thread here: and that is obiously one of those names that's unreachable with @ . After typing @ and the exact characters the name never shows up in the list and after finishing typing it will never be recognized and blue marked on the forum as a valid member-address. Not even in the thread he started himself

[Patrick Connor]

13 minutes ago, Friksel said:

in another thread here

which thread?

[Friksel]

4 minutes ago, Patrick Connor said:

which thread?

 

But I would expect the @ functionality to always work in comments because members like @Alfred are showing up in whatever thread I comment on using the @ auto-list. AFAIK

[Patrick Connor]

Fascinating, that user is called j o e i s p with a capitol i not a lowercase l  so perhaps that is the problem here try @ j o e i s p without the spaces

JoeISP

 

[Friksel]

6 minutes ago, Patrick Connor said:

Fascinating, that user is called j o e i s p with a capitol i not a lowercase l  so perhaps that is the problem here try @ j o e i s p without the spaces

No way.. you are kidding me. that was it... 

Still a little bit odd, because not only did I have this with several different members here (which unfortunetely I don't remember which ones), but also I copied the name from his profile several times and tested triggering the system by removing the last character and retype it. For that last part: obviously the system only gets triggered on a @, which makes sense. But I wonder what the problem with the other members was.... would they all have used an I in their names where I would expect an L in lowercase?

Funny though Thanks for helping me out @Patrick Connor

[walt.farrell]

As copy/paste cannot be used at all in tagging someone (you must type the @ and everything after it) if you're unsure what someone's username is I would paste it into some application where you can use a font of your choice to see what the characters are. Some serif font, probably.

[Friksel]

3 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

As copy/paste cannot be used at all in tagging someone (you must type the @ and everything after it) if you're unsure what someone's username is I would paste it into some application where you can use a font of your choice to see what the characters are. Some serif font, probably.

I agree. Next time I'll copy the membername, put it in some serif-font in some software to see the 'real' characters and type it the right way on the forum.