My understanding was that if the first three characters of a name match a username present in the chat for the previous seven days, the person will be pinged.
Out of curiosity, why does @Oɹʇ ping @Ortho? Aren't they different characters?
This seems to only happen in @Ortho's case. Flipping @Snail and @Cowp doesn't have the same effect.
Edit: It seems replacing any username that contains "r" with "ɹ", or "t" with "ʇ" works. You can probably reproduce this with some "user1234" accounts, if they've visited your chat.