Oh, tag subscriptions sound like fun. People could subscribe to their usernames, and it would emulate a feature I really like on another forum, mention notification. And no one would have to type an @ in front of the name to make it work.

Oh, tag subscriptions sound like fun. People could subscribe to their usernames, and it would emulate a feature I really like on another forum, mention notification. And no one would have to type an @ in front of the name to make it work.

I'm not entirely understanding this idea. Could you elaborate a little?

Okay, in some forums I could write @Micheal Tanczos in my post and the forum software would process that as a "mention" and you would get a notification that you had been mentioned, and clicking the notification would take you to my post. The problem with that is the @, because people who don't know about it don't use it. Probably the confusing part is that I was assuming that any tag term people had subscribed to would be added to an auto-tagging feature. Example, if I subscribe to "sunsndshadow" then when a new post is made it would be searched for all subscribed tags and if "sunandshadow" was found in the post, it would be added to the post's tags. Or this kind of thing could be done while typing, like Facebook recognized when you start to type someone's username and offers to autocomplete with a link to that person. If there isn't any auto-tagging then subscribing to one's username could work as a direct substitute for mentions, but isn't an improvement on it, because the post writer would still have to specifically tag me.

Oh, tag subscriptions sound like fun. People could subscribe to their usernames, and it would emulate a feature I really like on another forum, mention notification. And no one would have to type an @ in front of the name to make it work.

Wouldn't that require the tagging software to search the entire post when creating the tags? I may be misunderstanding the tagging feature that's being discussed here, but I figured it'd be something kinda like StackOverflow's, where you have a set of tags you explicitly add (rather than them being implicitly derived from your post). Also, on a random side note, I only just realized your username is sunandshadow (always just thought it was sunshadow)...

[quote name='sunandshadow' timestamp='1356296952' post='5013763']
People could subscribe to their usernames, and it would emulate a feature I really like on another forum, mention notification.
[/quote]

We don't have exactly the same functionality, but you can get notifications when someone quotes you. The option is in "My Settings" > "Notification Options" under the "Topics & Posts" subsection, and is titled "Notify me when someone quotes my posts (and I'm not already following)", and will notify you using the selected method any time someone quotes one of your posts if you aren't already following the topic in question.

Tag subscriptions unfortunately won't work well as a substitute for "mentions" because a) tagging is per-topic rather than per-post, and b) tags are added manually rather than automatically (for now), so the original poster would have to explicitly add your tag to their topic.

I do like the concept of "mentions", and I've seen it work well in other communities -- particularly where it's common to need to draw the attention of a specific user (often an admin) to certain posts -- but I'm not sure how useful it would actually be in a community as large and diverse as ours, where it's fairly unusual to require the response from any specific user.

Wouldn't that require the tagging software to search the entire post when creating the tags? I may be misunderstanding the tagging feature that's being discussed here, but I figured it'd be something kinda like StackOverflow's, where you have a set of tags you explicitly add (rather than them being implicitly derived from your post). Also, on a random side note, I only just realized your username is sunandshadow (always just thought it was sunshadow)...

Yes that would require the tagging software to search the first post of a new thread when it was submitted. This would not be much different than spell-checking, and should be faster since there would be fewer words in the dictionary of subscribed tags than in a real dictionary. But yeah it would have to wait for some kind of auto-tagging functionality.