I know about these two possibilities when user is notified about the message in chat:
- One is using @username syntax.
- The other one is direct reply to the message. This can be chosen after clicking on the arrow left to the message either in chatroom or in transcript, see the screenshot here. (Or simply by typing
:messagenumber
in the chat.)
(I am not sure whether the word ping is used for both of them or only for the first one. I guess there is no "official" terminology. To avoid problems with unclear meaning, I will avoid the word ping and use the word notification.)
I have learned that only users who have been in the room in the last two days can be notified using @username syntax (and also that there is an easy way to find out who can be notified in this way) from this answer: Does ping work in chat with no autocompletion?
My question is:
Is there some time limit also for the direct reply to a message? Will the user be notified even if it is older than two days? Will they be notified no matter what the age of the message is?
Summary of the experiments done below:
- Glorfindel posted a reply to my message here. I was notified by the "you've been mentioned in another room" message displayed in another chat room which I was in at the time. The notification was not displayed in my network profile inbox tab. It is also shown in list of replies which I can see in my chat profile.
- Since the above might have been influenced by the fact that I was in another room at the time and also by the fact that I posted messages in that room a few days ago (although more than two days and the actual reply was to a message much older than that) we did one more experiment. Glorfindel tried the same thing in Sandbox. I was not present in any chat room at the time. The message was three weeks old and I did not post any other message in that room since that one. Some twenty minutes later the red notification appeared in the super-collider-dropdown-thingy. Again I do not have anything about this message in my network profile inbox tab, but I guess it would appear there if I were not logged on any SE site at that moment. And I can also see it in the list of replies in my chat profile.
So the above experiments suggest that this works either for arbitrary old messages or the cut-off is longer than 20 days.