I'd say what Goob wrote some way below

• Mentions in posts of people whom you have placed in an aspect.
• Mentions in comments of the person who posted the post to which your comment is attached, or of people who have already commented on that thread.

This way for sure technically it can be done. I don't think "users will not get it" is a good excuse to not introduce wanted functionality.

so if i find a public post written by somebody i don't share with and i want to point it to you, will i be able to mention you in comment?

I don't think you can even mention people not in your aspects when creating posts. How would the pod know who to suggest?

But you are in my aspect. The creator of the post is not in.

@jasonrobinson Right now you can mention people in an post using the @. I'm not perfectly sure how it works, as it's for example possible to share to an aspect and mention someone not in that aspect.

If we're going to implement mentions in comments, I propose that we do it this way:

• You can mention anyone in your aspects or anyone of those who have already has commented.
• If the original post isn't shared with that person, then the mentionlink is coloured, for instance red. When clicking "Comment" a dialogue is shown, telling you that this person cannot show the post. If you click Comment Anyway, the mention just turns into an ordinary MarkDown link to the mentioned users profile, and the users don't get any notification.

Then we have no privacy leaks and the ability to mention people! The only thing is that you could use the feature to figure out which of your contacts that belongs to which of the other persons aspects. Don't know if that's a problem though.

I'm afraid I disagree with that, Ivan.

I don't think there is any benefit in @-mentioning someone if they are not going to get notification and will not be able to read the post or their mention. That sounds like a sort of reverse privacy leak - you're giving other people, who that person might not know, knowledge of their existence with a link to their details. I think that's a bad idea.

The only workable (technically, and from a privacy point of view) solution seems to me to be @-mentioning people only who are already part of that conversation.

From a privacy point of view, you could also add:
- people in your aspects, for a public post.
- people in your aspects and who are also in the aspects to which this post has been shared by the original poster, for limited posts.

But I suspect this would create enormous problems regarding federation and so on. The benefit would not outweigh the problems, from my point of view.

That's true, you certainly have a point. But the ability to see peoples' profiles is already some kind of privacy leak. Sure, you give away the knowledge of their existence, but as all profiles are public then doing so without the use of mentions is not super-duper-hard. Nothing prevents you, it's just to type examplepod.com/u/username and you're done. But yeah in reverse it's kind of an privacy leak, as this feature makes it easier.

I say the problem lays with the non-anonymity of the profiles. You can only prevent your profile to pop up in the diaspora search bar, not stay anonymous. So there are two alternatives if we want to keep our privacy standards:

1. We could implement mentions for the ones that has already commented on a post.

2. We could update how the profiles work and include mentioning all people that's in your aspects too (maybe we should a new loomio discussion about that?)

As the user agreed if they want to be searchable or not, we can simply check that, no ?

I think we should allow this feature maybe with some restriction but it's to bad to not have it only for really few weird use cases..

If it's possible to @mention people in comments who are in your aspects, and you @-mention someone who isn't involved in a discussion, it also gives away to anyone who sees that that they have a connection to you.

In practical terms, this might not be a problem in many instances, but no one is supposed to be able to see who is connected to whom in Diaspora, and by allowing comment-mentions of people in aspects, we're breaking the 'promise' that connections will not be revealed. It's a matter of principle rather than practical safety.

@goob You're perfectly right, I too mentioned this earlier but I dunno if you saw it. Mentioning in this way in a limited post also lets you know exactly which people in your aspects that belongs to any of the aspects that the poster posted to. So, if we want to stay cool and keep our fantastic privacy with the aspects, I guess there's only one solution left. Luckily it isn't a bad solution at all.

If we look at when people actually use mentioning right now, it is to get someone in the discussion's attention, not to link to another persons profile. So if we implement the function just like that, like @goob already proposed a long way down the page, there would be no privacy leaks, as you don't need to have a connection to those people, and no one would be unsure why not all people can be mentioned, hopefully ;)

Are we BTW ready to create some kind of proposals and start the decision-taking process?

If someone has time to look at that, it would be awesome. I often see public posts I want to point to people, mention them would be the perfect solution for that..

@sethmartin, this proposal is about mentioning other people in comments, not in posts. It's currently not possible to mention people in comments at all. You can of course provide a link to someone's profile page in a comment using Markdown, but this isn't '@-mentioning' in terms of Diaspora's coding, and doesn't provide that person with a notification. It wouldn't be affected by this proposal. This proposal relates only to @-mentions.

When someone already interacted with a post, he get a notification from it when somone comment. (the notification system has to be fixed to allow that for person not sharing with you, but that's not about mention). So allow to mention someone who already interacted is useless: he will already receive a notificaton anyway. Imo, mentions are useful to point to someone who didn't know the post "look, you could be interested about that!".

For public posts, we could enable mentioning of anyone, but let’s deal with that in a separate proposal.

This is the important point. Let's allow everybody to be mentionned in the comments of a public post, then, if we want, we could allow mentions in the comment of a limited post, but if the notification system is fixed, it's kind of useless..

@quentindufour Reshares are public posts. This proposal deals with private posts. Who is "everybody" on private posts? All users? Then you would be able to mention someone who isn't allowed to see the post and so he shouldn't get a notification. If thats all users who can see the post then you are able to create a list of those users which would be a privacy issue. Do you have a solution for the privacy issue?

@steffenvanbergerem Thanks, I didn't notice that detail. I edited my comment. And I will start to think about that.

@michaelmoroni

Reshares are public posts. This proposal deals with private posts.

Hey, I disagree with this - this removes a lot of the reason for having comments - alerting new people to a discussion.

Surely the users you can mention should be limited to those who are part of the post's aspect? If there's technical reasons why that's difficult, fine, but can't we agree that that's the ideal case scenario?

ALSO - and this is a serious qualm and makes me think we should rerun the vote - a couple of the comments from people voting 'aye' to this decision suggest that they think they are voting yes to having mentions, rather than restricting them (e.g. Is it wrong to say 'Yes' to this simply because I have this feature in other social nets?)

Also, whilst this is about 'private' posts there are lots of cases I can imagine where i would want to post things to various aspects - i.e in an ideal world quite a few people - without making it fully public, but would still want the ability to bring it to the attention of new people (who would still be within those aspects, but didn't notice it or comment on it straight away).

1. why should we limit possibilities of mentioning in comments, related to posts? in my opinion we should be able to mention everyone we share with, that is able to see commented post.
2. I don't see any privacy leaks here - I can mention somebody, so what? I can also paste a link to his profile and I cant't be stopped from doing this, so if I want to share knowledge of some person's existence, I'll do it anyway. The difference is - when I mention somebody, that person is noticed about that. Shouldn't we then encourage mentions whenever possible?

@nickdowson, your objection only makes any sense if the original post concerned is yours. If you're commenting on a limited post made by someone else, it is likely that none of your contacts will be in the aspect belonging to the other person with which the post was shared. And because of Diaspora's privacy controls, your account on your pod will not know who else is in that other person's aspects. This private information is not shared.

The only people you are able to know are part of the aspect with which the post has been shared are those who have already commented on it. This proposal therefore actually extends the reach of comment-mentioning beyond what would otherwise be possible. (Of course the actual extent is currently zero, because mentioning in comments is not possible at all.)

And while you can of course always say 'Yes, because other social networks have it', this doesn't have anything to say about why it would be a good idea to include it in Diaspora...

Hey @goob I disagree about your use case - i can think of plenty of cases when a limited post made by someone else might still be relevant to other people to post to.

Also, for the record, 'yes, because other social networks have it' wasn't my argument - I agree that that alone isn't a good argument. I was quoting 'Rich Kavanagh' who voted for this and suggesting he misunderstood the vote (maybe I've misunderstood it too).

@nickdowson there might be plenty of cases in which you would want to mention all sorts of people, but in a limited post started by someone else you wouldn't be able to, because your account would have no means of finding out who is part of of the poster's aspects to which they have shared the post. That's the point.

@goob One could also add users who liked the post. And the author of the post could be able to mention everyone who got the post. But thats all our 'privacy guidelines' allow.

@goob: Please, extend your mindset to not only people, who already commented on a restricted shared post - but also on people, who hit "Like" =)

However, you convinced me with your arguments.

@ryunoki This proposal deals with public posts. The last one was about private posts.

And although I didn't specify people who like a post in the proposal about limited posts, it did read 'limit mentions to participants', which would (or at least could) include people who had liked the post.

I'd be happy to vote yes on this, with the single provision that if a user is blocking you, you can't mention them. We should ensure that a public mention function doesn't allow for spamming or harassment.

I think that's probably a separate issue, Sean. It would be part of extending ignoring to prevent that users from commenting on your posts, etc. I agree with your point, but think it would probably be best implemented through the ignore function rather than the mention function, if you see what I mean.

@karthikeyanak i think the mention should be removed, when you don't want be selected.

I would like to go in @seantilleycommunit way. If I don't know some one, that one should not be able to tag me.

As @steffenvanbergerem says contacts + participants would be nice

@flaburgan, out of interest, why do you suggest that it is a good idea to be able to mention any user known to the pod in a comment, when you can't do this in a post? I don't quite see why this would be a different case.

Well, I also don't get why we limit that in a post :p

@flaburgan I don't know what the impact on the browser would be when searching someone in a list of a million (or more) users. Could be worth to find out. Perhaps typeahead.js could help.

+1 for allowing tagging of any publicly searchable person known to the pod. I mean you CAN already do it. You just have to 1) search for the person, 2) start sharing with person 3) mention person.

Since it CAN already be done, why not let users actually do it in a sane way.

Should be quite possible to do with something like typeahead and a well optimized search call to the backend.

agree with @starblessed. I guess making it an option in the settings will satisfy everyone…?

@jasonrobinson I guess we should discuss on a different topic if we should be able (or not) to mention people without having to share with them. That's maybe a different point.

Sorry if this has already been "mentioned" (see what I did there?) but will an @mention in a comment also appear as a notification to the mention-ee? (as per a normal @mention)

That's the idea.

(You can already post a link to someone's profile, but without a notification to that person, it is one-sided and not useful to them.)

Yay! When this will be implemented?

This will be awesome! :-)

When this will be implemented?

When someone volunteers to work on it... ;-)

11 months later, what are the news? I haven't seen anything like that on Github... Have I missed something?

Ok, let me reopen the discussion. After #6537 is merged, I'll start working on the mentionning feature in comments. This will happen in two steps:

1. mentionning people allowed in public posts only; the user writing a comment will be allowed to mention people from its own contacts list and from the list of participants,

2. mentionning people in limited post. This will be a bit trickier but my solution is to open a route for every post that will be the prefetch url for bloohound. For instance /posts/:id/:user_handle/contacts.json. The list will be composed of the contacts of the post author able to see it and also being a part the contacts of the comments author and the participant to the post.

For instance, A writes a post and B commented it. C will be able to mention B because B commented and mention D if D is in C's contacts list and also in one of the aspects allowed to see the post.

A remote pod doesn't and shouldn't know the contact list of A.

I'd say just do it for public posts only, allowing mentioning 1) own contacts and 2) participants in known to this pod in the post. That is what was voted on too.

Although I agree we should focus on public posts first, I strongly approve to do it for limited posts later.

@jhass: I think @augier just had a bit of trouble explaining his solution, but if I understand it right, I think it's a very good solution.

When the URL is requested, here is what is happening on the server:

1. The ID of the post (:id) will give the contacts of everyone involved in the post (post author + comments authors) + the list of contacts the author allowed for the post (the visibility list)
2. Then the ID of the user (:user_handle) will give its contact list
3. We intersect the visibility list with the user's contact list; we get the list of user's contacts that can actually see the post
4. We merge 1. and 3.
5. We remove the user itself
6. The result is the list of contacts the user can mention in his comment.

Example: let's say A is the author, U# are the users and UF# is U#'s contact list filtered out by the post visibility:

• A posts a limited post
• U1 comments, he can mention anyone from UF1 + A
• U2 comments, he can mention anyone from UF2 + A + U1
• U3 comments, he can mention anyone from UF3 + A + U1 + U2
• U1 comments back, he can mention anyone from UF1 + A + U2 + U3
• U2 deletes his comment
• U1 comments, he can mention anyone from UF1 + A + U3

Creak: I repeat, a pod the post was sent to, which does not host the author of the post, doesn’t and shouldn’t know the contact list of the author nor the full list of recipients of the post.

@jhass: I see your point, but what is the solution then? I understand we can't trust an external pod, but it seems that this problem is unsolvable within these conditions. In order to have this feature, I always see a contact exchange.

The other solution would be to allow to mention the post author, the comments authors and the user's contacts. Then if the contact mentioned in the comment can't see the post... well too bad for him!

That would work without having one pod to see the contacts of a user from another pod. But for the end user, that will be very confusing.

The compromise to have this feature somewhat is rather to limit the mentionable contacts to those that already participated in some way (commented, liked, reshared).

That being said, I think most of the time, this feature is only used to mention the post author or the comments authors and, less frequently, to ask someone for an opinion on the matter.

That would be easier to understand for the end user that, in limited posts, he can only mention active users on the post.

(BTW an active user could be someone that liked or reshared the post, doesn't it?)

Hehe, I think we've got our compromise ;)