Proposing a different approach to what I think enable ping completion for all comments wanted to achieve. New users should know that @ pinging in comments exists, and get educated on how to use them appropriately.
This happens so much often that three people comment on a new post and OP comes back and replies with
- names or usernames,
- or copies the comment as it was,
- or just assumes that by default everyone is notified.
But now the post is dead as none of them came to check back the replies and OP moved on or forgot about SE itself.
My attempts to far to counter this:
- In my own comments, appending
notify me by @ankii.
Entering threads that I won't enter otherwise to address OP with
Hi OP, you need to use @ to notify people. one person per comment. CC: @person-who-commented-before.
This creates a lot of problems, OP replying with thanks, etc., which I need to flag as NLN, mods seeing and deleting comments considering them as noise, the tagged person getting annoyed at me for not minding my own business.
Since OP didn't earn the comment privilege, they'd never read the help center page about the same.
Proposal
Current placeholder in the comment box is this:
Use comments to ask for more information or suggest improvements. Avoid answering questions in comments.
New placeholder is in the answers as community wiki.
Benefits:
[reply button] would take up more efforts from the dev team. Placeholder is just a stupid string somewhere. Which never got attention after it was set. .. Not saying that dev team is lazy,
There're a few drawbacks:
It can be a bit mundane for regular users to see when they type a comment. BUT I tend to ignore such texts with time anyway. I wouldn't notice a difference after 2-3 days of this feature being implemented.
It can be conflicting and often not allowed by the system (like removing the redundant @ automatically.). BUT when it happened to me at first, I think I just trusted the system and learned the method later.
Therefore if you type @ and don't get completion, you are getting immediate feedback that you don't need to do that.
Other useful content: How do comment @replies work? and Privilege Description in SO's help center
