1)
please see this ticket regarding “Public Message”:
https://trac.buddypress.org/ticket/1578
2)
regarding the “@username” within the text-box: it could even happen that somebody does not understand what this means and just deletes this “@username” from within the text-box. The “@username” should NOT be located within the text-message-box but rather being located outside of the text you are writing.
@JJJ
“The usage of @ may have been a twitter hack, but it came from using it as a way to acknowledge or direct a comment at a user when a threaded option wasn’t available….”
But now we DO have THREADED options at testbp.org.
So what is the point of still having the @username-feature ?
Please always keep in mind that applications are being used and are successful when they are SIMPLE only:
http://experiencecurve.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/apple-google-and-you.jpg
Twitter and the @username feature is a current media-hype which will soon fade away….
As Andy said above, the implementation can be improved, but the @reply functionality is not going to be removed from 1.2 just because it’s not perfect yet.
the @reply functionality is great and should not be removed. Totally agree.
But why do I have to TYPE “@username” if instead just CLICKING on a “reply-button” which would literally do the same result ?
In the end typing of “@username” is just a strange substitution of clicking on a simple button or reply-link.
Isnt it ?
The @username feature is for what I mentioned above – getting someones attention on a new post. You do not need to use the @username functionality for replies.
getting someones attention by using “Private Message” and “Public Message” including sending a notification by e-mail is perfect.
But why do we need the letter “@” in order to get someones attention ?
Because if I would mention your name somewhere for no important reason you would get annoyed by all the notifications you’d receive.. For example if I wrote a heavilly discussed blogpost on my site and people are talking about it around my network I would go crazy with the amount of notifications I would receive 
you need a character for this to make it work and @ is the best one By the way I certainly like this feature and I don’t think it’s that confusing for a user (apart from the displayname/username issue). But I do think it would be good if site admins could enable or disable this feature from the admin panel, just for those we don’t like it.
@Andy as much as I don’t like it, if we’re going with the @username idea, we should probably move the cursor to after the username not before (+ a space) so that they begin typing naturally at the right spot.
I don’t know about the Twitter @ phenom fading but I promise you, s much as it’s used, people still are annoyed by having to remember a username’s real name. I follow Aaron Brazell a lot on Twitter and still have to memorize that he is @technosailor
It’s not a matter of not liking it Bowe… I like the idea a lot… just not the way it’s being implemented.
Mike – this is a bug in Safari, if you use any other browser the cursor will be in the correct position.
You can prevent confusion if you generate the username (@peterverkooijen) from the real name (Peter Verkooijen), so I could probably live with this solution – haven’t tested it yet…
Good to know. Webkit bugs are so rare. Compared to IE for instance.
It shouldn’t be *too* difficult to modify the various auto-complete elements (and plugins) so a user could start typing a username or display name and we can insert the username when selected..
It would be nice to have that in before 1.2 is released..?
However, I do think one of the main issues is that a users status is updated when all they want to do is send somebody a public message..? Any way we can flag an update as not being a status update if it’s as a result of clicking ‘Send Public Message’?
having an “auto-complete”-functionality based on both – username and display name – would be much better than remembering and using “@username” all the time.
So even non-techie-users would be able to intuitively understand how the website works.
@hempton-smith – maybe it would be possible that the status doesn’t get updated, if the “update” start with an @username… that would at least solve this issue
I think one of the crucial issues is that you are mixing content with meta data. Twitter does this for obvious reasons, such as making it work well with text messaging. I like what Andy said about BuddyPress not being Facebook or Twitter, but one thing BuddyPress is… is WordPress.
WordPress does a great job of separating content from meta data. Blog Posts have content and they have tags. Why not use something similar here? Why not let the meta data be separate?
Just add a tag box! Any tag that starts with @ means that the tag name is really a username. Now think about the WP tag box. You type any tags in, separated by commas and press ‘Add tag’. The tags automagically get separated into their own little icons. A similar thing could happen in BP, but when @user tags are added, they get displayed as the user’s full name. You could have an interface that allows for entering @username or just allows the user to type a full name and have it autocomplete. Using auto complete is easier in a tag box than in a content box.
WARNING: Whatever you do, be very careful! If you merge content and meta data now, it may be very difficult to separate them later. In 1.1, wall posts had their content separated from the meta data specifying whose wall it was on. Now with 1.2 it sounds like all of my wall content will be modified to say who I was talking to. Then, if you change your mind and want to separate them out again in 1.3, you will have to modify the content again to remove the meta data.
@rvenable
Your post is so good its scary. It makes no sense to me to use a Twitterism of jumbling together meta data with post content. People do this on Twitter because they have no choice.
It works for Twitter, but they must be parsing out all of these tags and storing the relationships between the “embedded” meta tags and the “parent” post somewhere else for searching and whatever else.
This is a very dangerous direction to take. The core developers should tread very carefully.
I think rvenable’s solution is genious and satisfies all parties.
@rvenable
very good proposal !
following question:
lets say the user is creating his username during sign-up, for example “johnsmith”.
What about putting automatically an “@” in front of each username ?
So “johnsmith” will automatically become “@johnsmith” as the username.
So meaning there would not be any username without the letter “@”.
What do you think about this ?
I think that would not be needed and would look kinda dumb haha
I do think rvenable his idea is brilliant.. sound like exactly the right approach!
Some really nice points guys. I think there is some way to go to perfect how this will work.
I’m not worried about the current implementation since it very very simple. It’s just a filter on the content that is posted to look for @mentions. It’s not storing anything and the @ notation only acts as way to *notify* a user, it is not “sending” them a message in reality, so it doesn’t need to store a reference. It’s not like Twitter where it has to store a chain of @messages that all relate to one another since you can directly reply to the message with a comment. When you do that then a reference is stored.
I do love the simplicity though. It’s just a text box, no messing with extra boxes for tags, who it’s to, etc, etc. No UI bloat, I think that’s a beautiful thing.
@andy
Since you aren’t actually storing the @ tag, then I don’t see any problems with throwing this feature out there and see what happens. Let the end users dictate its success 
Andy, it sounds to me like you are storing the @ tag, you’re just storing it in the message content, which is what I don’t like.
You’re right that it is simple, which is good, but that doesn’t make it easy to use. A command line console is simple, and if you know the right commands it is efficient and easy to use. Yet, most people are confused by command lines. GUIs are far more user-friendly, but compared to a command line – a GUI is just UI bloat.
You said you plan on addressing the confusion between usernames and display names “probably though autocomplete, or accepting display names somehow.” I don’t know how you are going to do that without UI bloat.
I think the tag box idea minimizes UI bloat as much as possible, while keeping a healthy separation between content and meta data. I think that separation will be more important as BuddyPress develops and as more plugins are created.
Also, you said “It’s just a filter on the content that is posted to look for @mentions”. So, does that mean that every update message gets searched for the string “@rvenable” every time I want see my messages. Isn’t that going to get slow fast? Wouldn’t it be faster to have the message be stored in the DB with the user_id so you can just search a table of numbers instead of parsing thousands of string messages?
By the way, Andy, despite my concerns, I love the general direction that BP 1.3 is headed. I really love how the wire is gone and messages are becoming more generalized. I love that the @message means “Hey! Come and read this and reply!”, I just wish that the @message was separate from my content.
+1
I just want to agree on the confusion between user- and display names. I don’t think this will ever be crystal clear to a regular user. Like if I was to @ myself on testbp.org – not knowing about the difference between user- and displaynames – and a totally different name showed up in the message-textfield, I would probably get confused and think something like:
– Is this notification being sent to the intended user?
– Should I rename @nameA to @nameB because @nameB is the name I see in the profile? (When in fact the right answer is @nameA)
– This is too confusing to continue (fallout).
Just trying to imagine how users would react on this feature. Not saying this feature is bad, but I’ve said from the beginning that it should be more user friendly and I probably don’t need to say that the user- and displaynames confusion are bugging a whole lot of users.
