We used to bold user names but now with the @ username feature that seems to be falling by the wayside.
What, if any, are the pluses/minuses for you? Does it make any difference to you at all? Do you still just bold names?
For me, the @ user works great. The only small things I have with it are when I am requoted as part of somebodies reply and I get a notice but when I look they were replying to someone that replied to me. The other is I just think the bolded name looks better. Don’t ask me why.
The @ isn’t just a convention; on Discourse, it’s functional. If you @ a username, they get notified.
Bolding a username is a convention left over from the vBulletin days. It looks nice, and I use it when I mention a poster but aren’t really addressing them and don’t want to pester them with a notification, but I’m using that less and less and just using @ most of the time.
Hmm, I guess I haven’t really been distinguishing between the @ notifications and the ‘reply’ notifications, since they’re identical except for the icon.
I tend to lean more in this direction. Plus, also:
So the @ seems to be especially useful when wanting to directly address or call attention to or “page” the person, in a post that is not a reply to theirs.
Being someone who has self-proclaimedly entered early oldfartitude, I do expect though to keep using the old style for a good long while just because of stylistic inertia, while looking at the @ form more as in for instance “That’s an interesting question about San Juan; I wonder if @JRDelirious can give us light about this, being he’s lived there a long time?”
I think they are the same but, fer instance, if I’m quoting/replying to @begbert2 and slip in a mention of @JRDelirious being a big old meanie , JRDelirious will get a notification also. So if I want to slip it by him I can’t do the @ thing.
edit: sorry, deleted something that sounded snarky
I think the @ option is probably better everywhere except the MMPS, where bolding is the norm and will probably remain so because most who post there are do so often and don’t need an @ to inform them.
I use the @ sign by default, as it’s easier to type (especially on mobile). But I do think about when someone might not want to be notified (or when doing so would be inappropriate).
Oh, and even when I do use bold, I’ll often use the @ notation first for longer names to make sure I get the spelling right (or to avoid typing so much on mobile), then delete it.