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Thanks to the SO staff we have the awesome new feature of being notified when our name is said in a comment on someone else's post.

Here's the rules getting posted everywhere: (can we put them in an faq possibly?)

  1. Only applies to other people in the comments that you are commenting on.

  2. Response must include @username that you are referring to, where "username" is a reasonable match to the user's current display name (as seen in the comments above yours).

  3. There must be a starts-with, case insensitive match of at least THREE characters to the displayname. So @a and @ab will never match anyone or anything.

  4. Spaces cannot be used to match, so if the person's display name is "Peter Smith" then just use @peter or @petersmith to match.

  5. Matching is performed in reverse chronological order, so if there are five people named "John" in the comments, writing "hey @john, have you considered apples?" will match the most recent John to comment.

  6. Only one person can be replied to at a time in a comment. The first one "in" wins.

"...is a reasonable match to the user's current display name..." How is this implemented? I want to make sure I'm notified of any @responses, and if my username isn't optimal for this I will definitely change it. (for example, will @Crazy match my username?)

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"...is a reasonable match to the user's current display name..." How is this implemented? I want to make sure I'm notified of any @responses, and if my username isn't optimal for this I will definitely change it. (for example, will @Crazy match my username?)

Yes, yes it will. It will match the last user that matches the first three characters after a @. I'm not exactly sure about a username like pi sqr if @pi s would match, as spaces are taken into account, but haven't tried it, and it's rather hard now to change usernames to try it now.

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  • Laugh all you want, but I'll change my name. Then, you shall see! (I can't receive any @replies since my name is too short; the minimum is 3 letters without whitespace).
    – alex
    Feb 4, 2010 at 22:27
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If you want to make super easy to get all the notifications under this notation, and to curb other users from throwing your name around, simply change your DisplayName to a three-letter word.

Done.

No more @Juggler or @Drummer which you would miss because they reference you that way since it's part of your DisplayName and how they talk to people.

If you changed your name to CJD, that will remove all temptation for their reference preference and future replies to @cjd sets you up for the notifications.

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