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How do comment replies work?
Ive seen a lot of comments where people put @name to specifically address a comment made by another user. What is the protocol for this? Is it used by SO in any way?
Should the full name be used after the @, or if its a multi word handle, is just the first enough?
Here is the blog post announcing the feature. All of your questions are answered there.
https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/01/new-improved-comments-with-reply/
There are some rules, of course:
- This only works when referring to other people who have already commented. 2. Your comment 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 are ignored in the match, so if the person’s display name is “Peter Smith” then just use @peter to match, or @petersmith. 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 the string wins. 7. Users who have no display name set, whose faux-displayname is derived from their OpenID URL, cannot be matched.
I've found that this varies by user. Sometimes people use the full name, sometimes the first name, sometimes a shortening of the name (I get "eruc" and "eru" and even "e" sometimes), though a real shortening might not notify the user. This does seem to be the de facto means of addressing a previous comment, or the owner of the answer, or the owner of the question. As long as you don't change it to @jerk. :-)
