Forums » Suggestions & Development Discussion » Suggestion: Be alerted when someone 'quotes' you?

I've noticed that there is a quote option, but I can't find anywhere that tells me someone bothered to quote me. I see alerts that people posted in the same thread I have, but nothing that tells me they quoted me. Nothing on my home, or PMs.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I would love a feature for this.

No, you're right, there is no such feature. Unfortunately, there is also very little chance that there will be one in future. Sorry!

): Aww. Okay, well didn't hurt to suggest it.

Not at all! Thank you for the thought. It's more about how long it would take to create technically than it is about me not liking it or any such thing.

Semi-related! Deviantart just dropped a "shout out" feature. If you type @username in a comment, journal, or deviation comment, it sends an alert to the person mentioned. Personally I think EVERY site should have this. >D

Now @ replies are definitely something I have given serious thought to.

This is a little sticky here because it could *only* work for users, not characters, but I think that could be okay as well.

In that vein of thought, we did have a period where members (in mass-reply to others in a single post) would often @name everyone they were responding to, so such a feature could certainly have its uses here in lieu of a quote-alert feature!

There's something similar over on Writing.Com. Users there tend to have two names: a static username, and an easily-changed penname/handle, which made it tricky sometimes figuring out who was being referred to anywhere. Because of that, they set things so that a person's username could be entered, and always shows their current pen name and links to their profile/portfolio. They have their own "WritingML" that seems to be based on BBCode, so the setup is something like {user:username} (so, for example {user:novalyyn}).

More recently, matching up with some of the other updates they've made, they set it up so that whenever someone "mentions" you with that bit of code, you get a notification so you can go see it.

What about people who currently use the @name method frequently to refer to others by nicknames? How would it work for older posts? What happens when someone deletes their account/gets deleted/changes their username and someone edits a post with that username? What if a deleted username ends up being used by someone else?

It would fail, or end up pinging the wrong person if someone else had that nickname as their actual username.

It wouldn't. Only posts going forward would generate notifications.

It wouldn't. Only fresh posts would generate notifications. Edits would most likely do nothing to avoid re-pinging the same people over and over. I've been on other forums with this feature, and edits almost never seemed to do anything.

Since it would only generate notifications at the moment the post was posted, this would be irrelevant.

That said, this is one of those "future fantasy" features that I'm making no promises about. My list of "critically need" is just so long right now! I also cringe to think about the confusion our character system would cause with this feature. People will just about immediately complain they can't @ reply at anonymous characters to give them a heads up they are being talked about, for example.