634947 - Support using twitter style @username to mention specific users (method of targeting a comment or question at another user)

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1352571

(Bugzilla :: Creating/Changing Bugs, enhancement)

Description

[Guy Pyrzak]

Twitter has popularized using @username to specifically mention users and call their attention to things. I think we should support a similar capability in our comments. Users often want to call out the attention of a particular user on a bug, not necessarily add them to the cc list and hope they notice that this is a new bug that they know nothing about. By @usernaming someone, they get a different type of email than the normal bugchange email and instead the email looks more like the review request. 

It would say something like "You have been mentioned in Bug XX" and then contain the comment and who said it and a link to the bug, maybe the bug history.

Comment 1

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

That's a reasonable idea. I think @[e-mail] might be confusing, though.

I was instead going to implement a "Question" extension, though, where people could specifically say "this comment is a question" and then either choose to list or not list specific people who they were questioning, in an input box below the comment field. Then when those people next commented, we'd ask if they were "answering the question" and clear the question marker for them on the bug.

You could then see a list of questions that people had asked you, in the Bugzilla user interface, sort of like My Requests.

Comment 2

[David Lawrence [:dkl]]

Just thinking out loud. With Red Hat I implemented a UI hack around a flag called 'needinfo' that we used for this purpose. We used the requestee field to show who the question was being asked to. The UI hack had some shortcuts to pick reporter, assignee, qa contact, or other (free form field) which populated the needinfo flag requestee field appropriately. This seems similar to what is being requested here although the way we did it, unfortunately it did not link to any specific comment.

Dave

Comment 3

[Frédéric Buclin]

(In reply to comment #1)
> I was instead going to implement a "Question" extension, though [...]

This proposal seems pretty complex, IMO.

Implementing pyrzak's suggestion would be much easier once usernames are unique. This way, you wouldn't type the whole address email (which is indeed a pain), but simply e.g. @mkanat.

Comment 4

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

(In reply to comment #3)
> Implementing pyrzak's suggestion would be much easier once usernames are
> unique. This way, you wouldn't type the whole address email (which is indeed a
> pain), but simply e.g. @mkanat.

  Agreed.

Comment 5

[Frédéric Buclin]

I think we should only implement this feature once bug 218917 is implemented, per comment 3.