@Mentions Improvements

We've made a few changes to the @Mentions feature on LibraryThing Talk. Here's a quick summary. Also see the images at the bottom of this post

1. When you want to address a particular member, use @ + the member name.

This was true before, but few knew it, because we didn't keep the @ visible in the message. You can also use > + the number of the message to reply to a particular message. Those are treated as @Mentions too.

2. There's now a section on Talk called @Mentions. It shows "new" mentions, or, alternately, all the topics you've been mentioned in.

New here is defined as:
A. Recent (at present it's a few days)
B. Not read yet, or not read up to the mention
C. Not dismissed with the "Dismiss New Mentions" button

3. Every few minutes—at present 5, but I may slow it down up to an hour—it checks if you have new mentions. They show up as notifications section of the top bar. That's the little number by the "bell" icon.

Like other notifications, you have control over this. If you want to turn of all such @-mentions notifications, go to https://www.librarything.com/settings/notifications.

I anticipate that some members won't like this, viewing it as too "social-networky." This change, however, comes with universal agreement from staff—who generally disagree on a lot. Testing in the Board for Extreme Thing Advances (BETA) group was positive. And if you don't like it, you can turn it off!

Here's what the left-side link looks like:



Here's what the @Mentions view looks like:



Here's the notification in action:

I just tried the @mentions section on the left, but when I open a thread with new mentions, it takes me to the last read post, not to where I was mentioned. Is there a way for this to land on the mention?

>2 SandraArdnas:

Yeah, at present not. I think if we did that, people would complain in the other direction. And what if you're mentioned more than once. I don't know how to do this better.

>3 timspalding: That's OK, I suspected it might be difficult to code differently than the rest of the Talk, not so much that people would complain (it is after all the section you go to specifically to see mentions). But with @ before the user name, it's easy to use browser search in case of long threads that move fast

I do like this but I still think it’s a good-awful idea to have the @ show up when you’re referencing a post via pointy brackets. It looks horrible and it’s going to be incredibly annoying to be notified of every time someone replies to a post - even if you want notifications for other mentions. I don’t understand why this part of it is being pushed through.

I feel like someone replying to you message is equivalent to being mentioned. You want to have it notice when you're mentioned but NOT when you're replied to?

>6 timspalding: Yes, because I, like many others, am pretty active on Talk threads (well, I’ve been terrible at keeping up lately but I’m usually active) and get replies on a fairly consistent basis. And I’m not one of the more prolific people on Talk threads. I know people ho go through 15-20 300-post threads in a year - can you imagine having to deal with the notifications of all the replies? Have you seen how many posts are posted in the chatty groups? The 75’ers has 2 000 post a week!
This is nightmarish. And if you have your own thread you’ll keep track of new replies just by checking the thread like you normally would, you don’t need to be notified that someone replied. If someone wanted your attention enough to have you get notified, they could just @ you specifically.

I understand that not everyone spends as much time on threads as I do, but this would genuinely be an issue for the chattier Talk people. If this stays I will definitely have to opt out because I’ll go mad (and like I said, I am NOT one of the more prolific people on Talk threads) even though I’d like to be notified if someone @-ed me specifically.

Okay, so what if I divide them—you can be informed about mentions, replies, both or neither? I can't see this being the default. For normal users, these are the same thing.

>8 timspalding: If you also drop the @ when it is a reply from the display, that will be perfect :) But if not, separating them will be good enough.

I think that is what I was stumbling towards describing in the last topic, @ mentions and > replies, different but related, with each independently switch on/off-able (so two tick boxes in the settings menu). Then > replies could be an extra filter on the @ Mentions page?, so:
New Mentions | New Replies | All Mentions || Dismiss New Mentions

That would give finer control of what type of notifications we can receive, and have the side benefit of going back to just the > for replies. Assuming that's all technically doable which of course I have no idea on :-P

Good concept overall though, as I have seen several times new members confused/let down when they came back to their post later saying sorry they expected they'd get notified, which now they will be.

>8 timspalding: Maybe. (Would that remove the @ from replies? Because I’m sorry for being shallow but I can’t get over how bad I think it looks with both the pointy bracket and the @, and rather than getting used to it I get more and more annoyed by it.
But please make sure that people are well informed about the ability to turn off notifications, because it will make people’s notifications blow up. And I don’t think I’m the only one who gets stressed out by seeing that I have notification (just like I do when I have unread emails or text messages, or whatever).

And sorry, but who are “normal users”? Are the people holding Talk alive not normal?

>11 PawsforThought: Are the people holding Talk alive not normal?

Well, now that you mention it...

>11 PawsforThought:
Sounds like we need a metric in our Charts & Graphs to show us just how far off normal we are with our Talk posts... :-)
https://www.librarything.com/stats/MEMBERNAME/social

Maybe a comparison stat or two to put our word count or message count in context, like a Site vs. Member for Talk, and tell us if we are in the 'top talkers' percentiles. Could be fun/interesting.

Oddity - I usually use the Back button to get out of a thread (which takes me back to either the home page of the group or my home page, normally, since that's where I'll click on a thread). Both times when I Backed out of the thread I was mentioned in, I landed in Bug Tracking - I go there occasionally but haven't been recently. It's not horrible, I can get back to where I was...but it is a little bit confusing. Particularly as, this time, I was just starting a different thread when I noticed the new notification. Now I'm going to have to find it and the 90+ messages that I have not actually read (of 97 unread when I started). Now I know, and will _probably_ remember, so I'll go to the mentions from my home page rather than from the middle of a thread. But it would be nice, if possible, to go back to the place you were in when you hit the notification. That may be too complicated to manage, though.

Ah, less of a problem than I thought - clicking on a mention opened a new tab (for me, at least), so my half-read thread is intact in the original tab.

>8 timspalding: This approach, as further described in >10 Nevov:, would work for this not-normal user.

ETA: can the notification provide more information on where you’ve been mentioned? It just says “Talk” and that doesn’t help much — I’d like to know the thread title.

I've added setting for this, but, honestly, they don't work yet. I have to work on it again tomorrow. If you change the settings, I can't guarantee everything will save right, so you may need to change it again.

Not impressed with this "improvement". I star the threads I want to follow, and look at most of them every day. I just don't need the notifications, so have turned them off. I guess I can see why some might appreciate it, but for me it's just clutter.

Not a fan. I said in the other thread, and I'll repeat here, that just because there is a way to opt out, doesn't mean that the expectations don't change. I can opt out of getting emails and phone calls after hours, but that doesn't change that our world now has the expectation that every other person is available to them 24/7. LT was the last website I had found that doesn't enact notifications, which then sets up the expectation that everyone reply to everyone else immediately. Now, that's gone.

I'm also seconding what >5 PawsforThought: said. The @ symbols after the >00 look clunky, and my computer might explode if I get notified for every single reply. The people who use Talk at a 'normal' rate (as opposed to the people who don't ever use it, or post once or twice and never again) will probably almost universally turn this off. No one wants to open up their computer for the day with 200+ non-specific reply messages.

Not sure when I'd want this.

For replies, I normally view Talk through "Groups and Post", and read all replies to threads I've posted in anyway. So notifications for replies will be useless noise 99% of the time.

For mentions, well, does anyone talk about me in threads I'm not following anyway? If they do, do I want to know it? I guess I'll leave it on initially at least to see, but it does feel a bit weird that people'd "summon" me to threads I'd otherwise not look at.

BTW, if I turn of the notifications, can I still see the mentions and replies under "@Mentions" in Talk?

>6 timspalding: If these were split, I'd turn on notifications about mentions. I don't expect many of those and they are bound to happen where I'm not already involved in conversation, so a notification makes sense. I turned it off in the current setup to avoid them for every reply.

>19 AndreasJ: BTW, if I turn of the notifications, can I still see the mentions and replies under "@Mentions" in Talk?

Yes, these are two features:

1. Mentions. LibraryThing now allows you to see posts you are mentioned in.
2. Notifications. LibraryThing now gives you a small bell-image notification at the top of your screen, to indicate you have received mentions.

You can now get notifications based on these settings—none at all, or pick one or the other.

Thank you Tim! Much appreciated.

At present it won't respond instantly to changes in the sub-settings. They only change future notifications. They don't change ones up on the board now, as it were.

I just noticed that if I go to "All Mentions" via a mention notification, it persistently switches over my view of Talk from the "Groups and Posts" that I use 99% of the time. I don't think that's great design, and it's likely to cause ugly disorientation for some users.

Great. Now the only thing left is removing the @ when replying to posts.

>25 paradoxosalpha:

I just noticed that if I go to "All Mentions" via a mention notification, it persistently switches over my view of Talk from the "Groups and Posts" that I use 99% of the time. I don't think that's great design, and it's likely to cause ugly disorientation for some users.

Yeah. What else could it do? There a bunch of different views. People use a bunch of them. This is a new way to view things.

Now the only thing left is removing the @ when replying to posts

I really don't get the hate here. It's still a mention. And it's a way of making people understand the system.

>27 timspalding: It's still a mention.

No, it's a reply. A mention isn't connected to a specific post.

And it's a way of making people understand the system.

Did anyone have trouble understanding >#MEMBERNAME? Adding an extra symbol there is redundant and makes it look cluttered.

>27 timspalding:
Hm, now I see that even just the recent mentions is a persistent Talk view.

I understand the dilemma, that you want to use the Notifications dialog to get people to Talk, the same way that it gets people to Recommendations, frex. But for existing users, we're really used to not needing to attend to those Talk filters on the left. We set them and leave them for years.

I'm pretty sure I've seen a 75er or two really freaked out by this behavior.

>27 timspalding: I’ve explained this before. It’s not “still a mention”. It’s two different things. One is referring a specific post and the other a person, who might not have been part of the thread/discussion at all until then. They are very different and should be treated as such. Not to mention that having the two different things looking so similar is very likely to confuse people, especially newbies.

And then we have the fact that it looks really, really bad to have two different symbols before the username. It looks like the name of one of Elongated Mustrat’s kids.

>29 paradoxosalpha: I'm pretty sure I've seen a 75er or two really freaked out by this behavior.

I’m not surprised and I’m sure there will be more people confused when things start behaving really differently than before.

I’m not surprised and I’m sure there will be more people confused when things start behaving really differently than before.

There were 16 options on the left. There are now 17. That's not "really differently."

>32 timspalding: That’s not what I was referring to.

>32 timspalding: It's that clicking on the notification icon and then following a mention link changes your Talk option. That's very disorienting especially when you haven't changed that option for years.

It should take you to the thread but not change the option on the left. Just because I respond to a single mention doesn't mean that I want to change the way that I'm viewing Talk

I've added in a selector on the Mentions view (formerly @Mentions) in Talk.



I've also removed the @ signs by members' names for replies. I don't like it, but I'll yield on this one.

>35 timspalding: Sorry to beat a dead horse but another reason that their different is that when you click on a reply it takes you to a post but when you click on a mention you go to that users profile

oh thank goodness the reply @ is gone.

If the ># is meant to seem intuitive, it felt to me like the new version was saying "use the > AND the @", and that the name in the reply link should go to the profile, not the post.

Removing the @ helps clarify that this is a different thing and matches the notification settings you've given us (thank you!)

I messed up some logic, so the replies button wasn't filtering right. It is now, or will be in 0-5 as it pushed it to our servers.

>35 timspalding: Thank you. You are so gracious!

>35 timspalding: Thank you. Seriously.

>33 PawsforThought: Talk remembered when you switched views before too. That part is not new. I'm guessing people rarely use it and stick to Groups and Posts, so haven't noticed. Those who switch to Starred Topics regularly, or any of the others, are aware you need click Groups and Posts later to go back to that

>41 SandraArdnas:

I switch to other Talk views now and then, so the behaviour didn't confuse me, but it certainly surprised me - I'd expected the view to change only when I explicitly switched it, not just because I clicked on a mention in a notification.

>42 AndreasJ:

But how ELSE could it work?

>42 AndreasJ: Does it do that? That sounds like a bug, rather than a feature. I misunderstood in that case, I switched off the notifications. I thought it's about clicking the Mentions section on the left.

>43 timspalding:

I don't know how it works under the hood, but I figure you could use different variables for "view I'm at right now" and "default view", where the latter would only change when deliberately changing view in the lefhand menu.

Or the notification could take you to some sort of technically-not-a-Talk-page listing the relevant threads.

I had my first notification of an @ mention today, and I liked it. Mind you, it was in my own reading thread, so I'd have seen it when I checked that thread, but still, it was fine.

Life is complicated enough. Have absolutely no interest in Mentions.

Thank you for making it possible for me to turn all this folderol off.

>35 timspalding:, >38 timspalding: My Mentions view doesn't appear to be working as it should.



Both of these are Replies, not @Mentions, but appear under both the Replies and @Mention filter.

Something else just occurred to me. I just edited my post above to point towards Tim's post that I was replying to rather than SandraArdnas's which I'd originally erroneously pointed to. Any notification sent to SandraArdnas presumably isn't retroactively revoked, but does Tim get one when the post is edited like this?

>48 lauralkeet:

Fixed.

>49 AndreasJ:

So, there are two features here:

1. If you edit a mention, the mention changes.
2. Notifications are generated every 5 minutes. At present they cover all topics with messages since the launch. I'm not sure what the rule will be going forward and can't guarantee it will give you a notification if you edit a post from 2007 to add a name.

>50 timspalding: Perfect. Thank you!

I just noticed that if you hover over a member's name (in the blue line of a post) you see their profile picture too. Very cute.

>52 humouress: Oh I love that! Thanks for pointing it out.

Oh well that's darn cool. I like the little About and book data line. Sweet.

I'm coming in late here, and didn't read all 53 prior comments. So my apologies if this has been said before.

There's a minor problem with the notification icon for new @mentions. In particular, if I happen to read the new @mention without going through the notification UI, the notification doesn't go away. I have to click on the notification icon, select "You have 1 new @mention in Talk", and bring up a page with "There are no topics to display. You may wish to choose a different Talk view." - otherwise, I'll continue to be falsely told about new @mentions. (Maybe if I wait a few days, the notification will go away on its own. I haven't trued that.)

FWIW, this seems like an intensification of a problem that already existed. I receive certain notifications from LibraryThing by email. I read them there. But I still get an (unwanted) notification icon telling me about the email I've already read. I can turn off receiving those emails, but last I checked, I couldn't turn off receiving a persistent notification on LibraryThing's site.

FWIW, this is quite common on the web. Several brokerages notify me by paper mail, email, and some kind of web-based messaging system. I can't turn off the web-based one, which is almost always the last I see, since I usually go to their site only in response to some notification I receive. So it's useless and a bit distracting - being notified about already read messages from months earlier - contributing its small mite to a busy web site full of useless-to-me UI elements making it harder to find the ones I actually use. But heh, it's important to them that I read the third copy of a notification that a regularly scheduled routine event happened as usual.

But getting back to LibraryThing's new too persistent notification: please make it go away when the user reads the relevant @message. Failing that, implement a simple "dismiss message" or "dismiss all messages" UI. Don't require the user to go to a page that they know will have no useful content, complete with a message that clearly implies they went there believing there'd be something worth reading.

And overall, IMNSHO, less is more when it comes to notifications. I'm currently getting approximately 5 emails per online retail transaction; it's almost enough to make me go back to purchasing only from bricks and mortar retailers. Please don't adopt this trend, no matter how much it may look "modern" or "state of the art".

That's strange. When i have received mentions lately, but read the thread before going to the notification, a simple refresh of the page removes the alert.

I haven't actually opened the "you have a new talk mention" thing since it was introduced (I'm not even sure what the wording is!) - I've yet to be alerted to a mention in a thread I'm not already following and reading.

>55 ArlieS: I'd like to dig into the issue with your @ mentions not clearing. Are you reading threads in multiple browser tabs? Or, does refreshing the page not remove the notification (like >56 keristars: mentions)? What browser and OS (operating system) are you using (e.g. Google Chrome, version 90 and Windows 7, etc.)?

"But I still get an (unwanted) notification icon telling me about the email I've already read."
If you're reading the notification/s directly in the email, I don't think there's a way for the LibraryThing site to know that you've read them. The notification/s should clear when you've seen them on the site, though.

"...implement a simple "dismiss message" or "dismiss all messages" UI..."
You can click the "Dismiss New Mentions" button at https://www.librarything.com/talk?mode=mentions when you need to.

"...less is more when it comes to notifications..."
You can decide which Notifications you want (or don't want) at https://www.librarything.com/settings/notifications, hope this helps!

>57 kristilabrie: Notifications do clear after reading the notification on the site. They *don't* clear when you look at what they are pointing to. So after I have read a reply to me in a topic, the now-pointless notification persists until I have read that notification. A minor irritation.

>57 kristilabrie: I pretty much always read in multiple tabs, using e.g. the list of starred topics as a launching page. I refresh that page from time to time, using <command&rt;r in my browser (Safari), or sometimes clicking in the URL line and hitting enter. (I'm on a mac, hence r .)

The notification icon in the upper right can't have its contents read that way; it expands like a menu if you click it, leaving the page otherwise untouched.

If I click it I get a little pop-up, on top of the window. I then right click one of the lines of that pop up, e.g. "You have 1 new @mention in Talk" and launch that list in another window - not wanting to disturb my launch window.

Currently, I refreshed the talk page, saw that there was some notification, and that there were new (unread) messages in *this* thread. I right clicked on this thread; the resulting window shows that I have a notification.

Clicking the notification icon on either window shows that I have 1 new @mention in Talk. That's not precisely true - I've read, and am currently responding to the message with the @notification.

>59 ArlieS: clicking "post message" on *this* page did not get rid of the notification icon. That's consistent with other observations - posting a message to a thread *usually* does not result in the thread contents refreshing, and you may get a message number that won't be the ultimate one when you do refresh - in that case, my current message will probably point to some random message someone else typed at roughly the same time.

<cmd>&rt; in the "topics you've starred" window did get rid of the notification. Possibly hitting return in the URL line does *not* always cause a page refresh, depending on the phase of the moon or the whims of the browser developers. (I'll check that recipe next time I see a notification, and can trivially guess which thread is involved, and/or happen to stumble onto it.)

>58 paradoxosalpha: Is it the >reply or @ mention? I have the >reply
notifs turned off, but I really have never opened the mentions page since it was introduced, yet i don't have any notifications to clear.

I'm wondering if there's a difference in how they work?

> You can click the "Dismiss New Mentions" button at https://www.librarything.com/talk?mode=mentions when you need to.

This requires loading yet another page. Worse, if I go to that page after reading the relevant threads, I get the weird "you should go somewhere else" message, because the @mentions are already off the list.

In any case, what I'm looking for is an obvious-to-users "dismiss *notification*", not the @mention itself. The right place for that is probably in the pop-up mini window you get when you click on the notification icon.

Refreshing the page is *not obvious*.

I know of no browser that even documents the method of refreshing a page anywhere a new user will find it. Those of us who've been told about it for browser X tend to figure it out for browser Y, or browser X on a different OS, by following heuristics like "this one's on linux; try the ctrl key". But if no one ever tells us how to refresh the page, and there's no button or menu item (typical), we may not even know it's possible.

Worse, the creative people who write browsers - and web pages - have changed the way they behave in this area. Once upon a time, web pages did not auto-refresh. They also didn't have auto-refreshing elements, like a clock, that make it appear (falsely) that the whole page is being refreshed. And hitting return in the title bar reliably refreshed page contents. If you go back far enough, your browser didn't cache last week's version of the page, and present it to you when you typed the same URL in a new window - unless of course you dug through settings to modify default behaviour.

So the only people with working intuitions are either very new to the web (didn't internalize a prior system) or working in the industry.

refreshing the page should happen in the course of using the site, though. don't you refresh the Talk page after opening all the threads to look for new posts?

I find that if I look at the topic that has a mention, but not at the notification page itself, the notification does clear on its own but it takes a significant delay - about 5-10 minutes

It does take a while to clear. If I go to the topic without going via the mention, the notification doesn't clear straight away, even if the page is refreshed or I go back to the Talk list. If I go via the mention, the notification for that topic usually clears (if I have several). However, if it's the last mention, the yellow highlight at the top of the page clears but if I hover over it, it says in greyed out font that I have one mention. (If I go to the mentions page, there's then nothing there.)

I think that's the sequence. I've learned to ignore it when it takes a while to clear.

>58 paradoxosalpha: This is helpful, but help me understand what you're saying, if you don't mind: what's the situation where the notification/s don't clear when you just "look at what they are pointing to?" Sorry for being a little obtuse about it.

>59 ArlieS: Okay, I think (if I'm understanding the process clearly) you'd technically need to refresh the page before your last step, in order for the notification to clear properly (the way the current UI is set up). I'll ask @conceptDawg if there's something reasonable that can be done to make the recognition more immediate.

>62 ArlieS: Re: "Dismiss New Mentions" - I understand your frustration. It would be nice if there was a way to dismiss notifications in the top-right pop-up... I'm not sure if we'd then want to split grouped notifications up so that you could dismiss notifications individually... in which case members would complain about the rate of notifications they're seeing, and we have another problem on our hands. There's a balance here that I think the developers tried to handle as best as they could (at least at the first go of this "new" feature).

I'll ask @conceptDawg about your comments, here, as well.

>64 norabelle414: You're sparking my memory, and I think that's right - I'll need to double check, but I believe @timspalding told me the notifications update every 5 minutes or so, regardless of what the activity is (new notification, read notification). Which would make sense why some members aren't seeing them clear immediately.

>66 kristilabrie:

My usual way to access Talk is to go to the Talk tab, where I have it set for "Groups and Posts." That will naturally take me to threads where replies to me have been posted. If I go into those threads and read the replies, it doesn't clear the notifications.

Given my long history of LT use prior to the dawn of these notifications, my habits incline me to see the replies first, and then I have to go to the notifications just to clear them out. I could just turn them off, I guess.

>70 paradoxosalpha: If you leave them alone, do the notifications eventually go away after you've read said messages? (Say, after 5 minutes?)

>71 kristilabrie:

I haven't tried that yet. Reply to me again and I will.

>69 kristilabrie: Having it be yet another asynchronous event that happens _eventually_ would certainly explain a lot of the confusion. Sometimes I do X, and observe that the notification has cleared. X had no effect whatsoever, but since I'm not reading the code, I don't know that. Other times, I do Y. This causes an async task to eventually clear the notification - but since it's not immediate, I see Y as having no effect(*). Meanwhile, someone else does X without the notification coincidentally clearing, but experiences the same coincidence after doing Z. And a third person does Y, and the clear-the-notification coincidentally runs soon enough that they (correctly) see Y as having done the trick.

(*) More correctly, probably, Y creates conditions such that the already running async task decides it's supposed to clear the notification.

*sigh* I'm an old fogey, and I really miss the days when just about everything in software happened synchronously. It was so much easier to understand what was going on. Now I get to play games where things I've just used up sometimes show as still in my inventory for a random but perceptible amount of time. etc. Etc., etc., etc. I more or less understand why this leads to more efficient program operation, but the downsides can easily make me a bit crazy.

>73 ArlieS: Back in the day on another forum our message notifications were not corresponding to us reading them, you'd read your message and the little bell would stay there, then it would spontaneously clear, then the number by the bell would start building up again, we were all very confused and busily messaging each other trying to work out the patterns. It turned out we were all seeing the admin's message notifications!

>72 paradoxosalpha: Okay, thanks. Trying now!

>75 kristilabrie: All right. Experiment initiated.

It did go away eventually! More than a couple of minutes, less than an hour. Sorry I can't be more specific.

>77 paradoxosalpha: Okay, thanks! I think it should be about 5 minutes, but I suppose I wouldn't be surprised if it was longer.

>78 kristilabrie: Clocking it more precisely now. I looked at your reply at 12:33 ...

So now the notification disappears after you've looked at it, even if you haven't read all the messages earmarked?