General Forum Enhancements

I know Dev team have tons of stuff on their plate, but I think some forum enhancements could do wonders for community engagement. +1 buttons, smite buttons, Public display of banners, medals ... I ran small Halo Clan back in the day, and we used to run Contests like 'Spirit Award, Most Improved, Best Player, Best Team Player, ect' and we would make little icons that would appear next to that persons name. Something like that would rock, because dudes who are super active and helpful get a little badge that indicates their greatness, boosting their egos and motivating people to participate. Also, being able to reply @people (so they get a message), and getting notification when a thread is new on the thread. Notifications in the Upper right hand corner about new stuff being said in threads your participating in would also be a plus. I just think the forums in general, while good for what you guys needed when you started, could use some tender loving care.

Bryan W. said: Notifications in the Upper right hand corner about new stuff being said in threads your participating in would also be a plus. Those sound like some good, some interesting suggestions. One of the requests, you can already do. Click "Follow This Topic" in the upper-right of a thread, to start getting Notifications in the Upper right hand corner about a thread you participated in.

The Follow This Topic thing is fine for some threads where you're generally interested in what's being talked about, but being able to call a particular thread to the attention of other users promotes a sense of community, and allows someone with that extra bit of knowledge linking the topic to the person they are notifying to pull others into a conversation if it makes sense. ("@Aaron, didn't you solve this problem with your isGM script?") One problem with that is that if you drop @Aaron in to a thread, which one of us do you mean? The reason the @ works on Twitter is that usernames are unique, so it's explicit which person you are talking to. With Google+, you have a friends list to choose from, with more info. To really get @ call outs to work, you either need to get a list to pick from of all matching individuals (boo!), or have friends on roll20 (which is much requested already), or specify by player ID (also boo!!). Anyway, +1 for forum updates (but not at the expense of RPG related features! =D )

Aaron said: One problem with that is that if you drop @Aaron in to a thread, which one of us do you mean? The reason the @ works on Twitter is that usernames are unique, so it's explicit which person you are talking to. With Google+, you have a friends list to choose from, with more info. To really get @ call outs to work, you either need to get a list to pick from of all matching individuals (boo!), or have friends on roll20 (which is much requested already), or specify by player ID (also boo!!). How does the StackExchange network handle it? If you call out someone who has posted in the same comment thread, if gives you an autocomplete list, and names are unique... but you can also call out arbitrary people (who haven't necessarily already joined the conversation), and SE permits abbreviating names to some extent.

Good question. I started to type something about SO, but then deliberately avoided the topic. Certainly, there are many more Aarons on there than just me (2309 other ones...). My guess would be that it takes the matches, sorts them by their activity in the tags on the question and their reputation, and then takes the top one. It would be an interesting question for meta.stackoverflow.com, if it hasn't already been asked. I bet Jeff Atwood would love to talk about it at length on his blog. =D Edit: I tweeted him, we'll see if he answers.... =D

Ah, found the answer: <a href="http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/43019/how-" rel="nofollow">http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/43019/how-</a>... TL;DR -- You can't call out to people not on the post. Names are resolved in reverse chronological order, so last Aaron to post on a topic gets notified. Lots of glorious details about abbreviation strategies.