Allow user to prevent being mentioned?

[tyw]

I was wondering if its possible to allow a user to prevent someone from mentioning them? As far as I can tell this isn't possible, and I don't see any Ideas 

Since nothing was found in Ideas i'm hoping there is a way to do this.... i'm just not finding it? 

I know the user can turn off mention notifications but I'm looking for the ability for a user to say 'do not allow others to mention me'. 

Is this possible or should I draft an idea?

Use case; We have a generic corporate account that gets mentioned all the time due to its username. Preventing this would reduce significant noise 

[VarunGrazitti]

@tyw - Since not feasible OOTB, could be build-out where we can customize this to achieve the required functionality.  

[StanGromer]

I've been asked this before, so here's my unasked for devils advocate of feedback / worries - I would argue this breaks the experience for all other users / If a user doesn't want to be tagged, they shouldn't have an account in the Community / Change their username to something else?

Example: Tom doesn't want to be tagged.  Sally goes to tag Tom in a post. It doesn't work.  Sally now doesn't understand why tagging didn't work, and refuses to use it again since it sucks. Timmy also tried to tag Tom, but he opened a ticket w/ support. Support just spent $200 in labor trying to troubleshoot it before they realized they have nothing to do with Community and sent it to our team, where I explained the problem to Timmy.  Timmy has now decided he also wants to opt out of being tagged, but he was a super user, and now 50 more users don't understand why they can't tag their favorite Community user...and here comes Karen....

TLDR; It could be a can of worms.

[tyw]

Thanks @VarunGrazitti! I've made a note 🙂 

Devils advocate feedback is always welcome, and I couldn't agree more so thanks as always for great feedback as always @StanGromer! 

One more use case, parental leave - we have a lot of staff in the community and every time someone goes on pat-leave this Q comes up. We turn off PM, and update signatures to indicate their away but people still mention them whenever they discover an older thread. It leads to anxiety for the staff member who feels obligated to flag it, or respond despite being off 😞 

Expectation setting is hard lol 

I'll write up an idea and follow-up here when its been submitted for a OOTB feature

[CélestinO]

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@tyw wrote:

Use case; We have a generic corporate account that gets mentioned all the time due to its username. Preventing this would reduce significant noise 

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There could be a solution for that specific case : create a content filter and add the following sequence as a word:

<li-user login=“[Username]” uid=“[ID]"></li-user>

Select the filter action. You could either block from posting or select a replacement word (e.g. [Username] (Mention limited))

Note that this filter would not apply to admins and moderators

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@tyw wrote:

One more use case, parental leave - we have a lot of staff in the community and every time someone goes on pat-leave this Q comes up. We turn off PM, and update signatures to indicate their away but people still mention them whenever they discover an older thread. It leads to anxiety for the staff member who feels obligated to flag it, or respond despite being off

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The alternative above could also work but it will require some organisation that could look like this:

• Set a filter for each member of your team
• Bypass it by default
• Once a parental leave is confirmed for a member, make a note in the calendar to set a new filter action on the eve of their departure
• Bypass the filter on the eve of their return

Hope that helps

[tyw]

This is great!

Thank you sharing this suggestion @CélestinO! 

I didn't even think of content filters here! Great stuff 😊

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Update; I've applied the content filter workaround, replacing the mention with a bolded version of the username only. Some users might be confused by this workaround - unless custom work is done the only 'notice' I found to give a user was updating the following text keys so the default text 'enter 2 or more characters...' now shows 'Note; Some staff cannot be mentioned' 

The keys I updated: 

• mentions.mentions-message-list.default.title = Note: Some staff cannot be mentioned.
• mentions.mentions-user-list.default.title = Note: Some staff cannot be mentioned.

Thanks again all for your feedback and ideas! 

[MarkAtTruth]

@StanGromer I see that for some it could be a can of worms but also there are some cases where two people don't get along in the community but can otherwise co-exist with other members in the community without issue.

I want to keep people in the community and not tell them deal with it.

I have had people say.  "Hey I don't want user X to @Mention me because we have differences and it causes conflict in the past." I admire this rather then having a public spat on the community. Rather than tell them, "deal with it" i'd like to tell them, sure we can prevent that user from @Mentioning them. I would want it to find the user to @mention but have the user grayed out with user text that says. "This person can only be @mentioned by certain members". This way it doesn't cause them to reach out and mention that something is broken.

I have had these same people also ask to not be notified by any posts by the same user.

Perhaps it's more of a "mute" option that can be assigned to a user.

Go to profile Mute user123

George555 muting user123 will:

• Prevent the user123  from @mentioning George555
• Prevent the user123  from private messaging George555
• Prevent the user123  from kudoing George555's posts
• Prevent the user123  from friending/following Georoge555
• Prevent Forum posts and Articles user123 authored from being delivered if George555 follow places user123 created content in.
• Prevent replies/comments from being delivered on content George555 and user123 are both participating in
• Provide warning to George555 before posting comments on forum boards, blog articles or comments on any content that was created by the muted user.
• Will hide forum posts and blog articles in the content's containers posted by user123 that george555 looks at. If user123 didn't create the root post then the forum post or article will still appear in the list.
• George555 will also be warned when they mute user123 that they will not be able interact with the user in the same ways as mentioned above.

[Claudius]

We can't get this to work at our community where sometimes users are @mentioning our brand name in an attempt to gain our attention. Whenever I am adding the username "Dataiku" as a content filter with a capital "D" the resulting filter is showing lower cased:

I was wondering if you could share a screenshot of your content filter where you got it working, @tyw ?