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This is what my collider dropdown looks like right now:

enter image description here

The topmost comment is an hour old. I was not notified of this comment: http://fhc.quickmediasolutions.com/image/-2070147418.png

why? Is it because of the trailing dots?

I had a feeling there were notifications missing over the last week or so, but this is the first case where I can pinpoint it.

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  • I guess the dots caused the problem, also because a username can contain dots. Still, I think it would not be difficult to find to which user the comment was really directed by checking the username with a closer match. I wonder what would happen if somebody would write Peak... instead of Pekka, and there is a user who is using Peak as username.
    – apaderno
    Apr 24, 2011 at 0:01
  • ...also, notifying yourself doesn't seem to work anymore.
    – uɐɯsO uɐɥʇɐN
    Apr 24, 2011 at 7:07
  • And finally solved :-)
    – Arjan
    Jul 19, 2014 at 15:06

1 Answer 1

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There used to be a problem where people with dots early in their names were unnotifiable (because the dots would be stripped out and the name match would always fail), but it was fixed, so now dots matter. According to rule 3 of How do comment @replies work?:

If there are more than three characters in @name, then all given characters must match (neither @alix nor @aliceinwonderland will match user Alice).

Thus, at the time the question was asked, @Pekka would match, but @Pekka... would not. There was an exception to the rule where a single trailing punctuation character won't break the match, so @Pekka. or @Pekka, would work, but since there were three in this case it didn't apply at the time this question was asked.

In July 2014 this exception has been extended, and @Pekka... now works as well.

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  • thanks! Indeed, no notification.
    – Pekka
    Apr 24, 2011 at 7:55
  • This is correct -- only one trailing dot is stripped. /cc @Pekka
    – balpha StaffMod
    Apr 24, 2011 at 8:25
  • @balpha any chance of changing this, like checking for a match with dots first, then without? I think this might happen occasionally.
    – Pekka
    Apr 24, 2011 at 8:27
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    @Pekka If you ask me, we should rather teach people to stop throwing "dot dot dot"s out there :) By the way, the "real" U+2026 would work just fine. Seriously though, I'm torn. The more magic you put into this, the more people expect stuff to work magically (like the first comment under your question). And after allowing "@person...", next thing someone wants is "@person...look, I didn't put a space there" to work. On the other hand, the case itself isn't invalid, and I'm not really strongly opposed.
    – balpha StaffMod
    Apr 24, 2011 at 8:44
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    @balpha yeah, I see your point. However, ... preventing notification feels pretty counter-intuitive, I would really consider making an exception for that one. Or converting ... into U+2026? But that brings other problems.
    – Pekka
    Apr 24, 2011 at 8:49
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    @Hendrik I'll try to fixup my answer, which is nearly wrong at this point. I never include the trailing period in my paragraphs, so if you want to fix that you'll need to suggest edits to quite a few of my posts :)
    – Michael Mrozek
    Jul 22, 2011 at 13:45

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