

Mention @somebody. They're notified. - mnemonik
https://github.com/blog/821-mention-somebody-they-re-notified

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thwarted
Sometimes, I really wish the ~, rather than @, had gained popular traction for
referring to users. @ already had meaning, and stuff to the right of the @ was
the location of the stuff on the left. Now there are things on both sides of
an @ that indicate specific identity.

~~~
gte910h
~ means approximately in many places.

I prefer the pronounceability of @ over ~

~~~
thwarted
Does anyone actually say the @? No one says the # in hashtags.

~~~
gte910h
Aloud? Yes. Almost always in presentations especially.

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ch0wn
Github never ceases to amaze me. Despite all the features Github has, it still
manages to maintain an incredibly light and intuitive UI.

EDIT: s/seizes/ceases/

~~~
citricsquid
Thought you might like to know the phrase is "never ceases" not "never
seizes":
[http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Is_the_saying_never_seizes_to_amaz...](http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Is_the_saying_never_seizes_to_amaze_you_or_never_ceases_to_amaze_you)

(Not sure if it was a typo/brainfart/not-english-speaker but figured you might
like to know)

~~~
ch0wn
Thank you, it's the third of your options. (;

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jedsmith
I like it! Too bad it'll probably be abused, and force people to turn it off.
I have high hopes for the average Github user, but it _is_ on the Internet.

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ChuckMcM
I wonder if there will be unintended consequences if this gets really popular.
There always seems to be that 'one engineer' who has a combination of good
architectural taste, a lot of historical knowledge, and an ability to pull out
the wheat from the chaff. Currently the thing that allows them to get anything
done at all is that you physically have to go over and bother them if you
would like to get their input, but if they start getting a stream of mentions
perhaps it would simply get turned off.

That being said, I'm all in favor of putting a user id or group id in a
TODO(username) in comments so that whattodo(name)* can give me a list of
things in the source base that could use my, or someone on my team's
attention.

[1] implementing the whattodo command is left as an exercise for the reader.

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wanderr
We use @mentions internally at my company. It helps us to filter/prioritize
emails that we are @mentioned in. Definitely a great handy shortcut for
getting someone's attention, I hope more services adopt it.

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pinko
My only wish is that you could blacklist (or whitelist) people from whom you
recieve notifications, rather than have to disable the feature entirely.
Otherwise this may turn into an extremely effective way to spam high-value
developers.

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powdahound
Awesome! We've had support for this in HipChat rooms for a long time and I
find myself using this syntax all over the place only to be disappointed when
it doesn't actually notify people. Hopefully more apps will follow along.

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epynonymous
this is too sweet. but as the notified, can you choose to unsubscribe?

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uxp
Yep, the blogpost linked here reveals the notification center[1], which gives
you a bunch of options as to what notifications you want to receive.

[1] <https://github.com/account/notifications>

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barista
I wish other commenting systems would implement this feature.

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nfriedly
<http://twittermentionmonitor.com> is a side project that I started to do this
for tweets - whenever someone @mentions you in a tweet, the site forwards it
to you as a direct message.

Ignore the payment part and just click the "sign in with twitter" at the top -
it's free right now because payment doesn't work yet ;)

