+mention

[mokou]

This is in a similar vein as the +polite (#106) idea, but instead of indicating to a client that it shouldn't alert a person, it indicates that it should. Making this a new issue so as to not hijack the other one.

Mentions

The idea would be to decouple mentions/nickname-highlights from the message content itself. Besides providing for a standard way to ping someone by their nick, it could indicate if a +reply to a message is intended to alert the person replied to.

Additionally, it could provide for a field to search on for chathistory like ircv3/ircv3-specifications#438 sort of touches on.

Normal mention

@+mention=Bob :Alice PRIVMSG #ircv3 :Bob: good morning!

@+mention=Bob :Alice PRIVMSG #ircv3 :Good morning!

Mention entire channel

@+mention=#ircv3 :Alice PRIVMSG #ircv3 :Hey everyone, make sure to blahblahblah...

A +reply with explicit mention

@msgid=123;+mention=Bob :Alice PRIVMSG #ircv3 :Good morning!
@msgid=456;+reply=123;+mention=Alice :Bob PRIVMSG #ircv3 :mornin

Silent Mentions

I think it's also worth supporting a concept of "silent" or "polite" mentions. Where a normal mention would be attention grabbing, such as with a push notification, a silent one would perhaps only be indicated by an unread notification badge, highlighted channel, or similar.

This could be done a different tag, such as by adding a +silent tag to indicate that all the mentions should be silent. Alternately, going more in line with the +polite idea if granularity is desired, the target in the +mention tag could be prefixed with ! or something to indicate that it's a silent mention.

[ValwareIRC]

I very much like the angle of this. I would suggest making this a CAP for cases where there is a +mention value for a user who wasn't specified in the user's message and the server can then know if they should notify about a mention by other means such as a server notice (which would only be as intrusive as having that many mentions anyway)

[runxiyu]

I'm not sure how this would interoperate with clients that don't implement this. Neither of the following are desirable IMO:

• Clients that don't support it simply lose the pings
• The server modifies the message content and prefixes it with the target client's nick with a colon (which also has issues with the 512-byte message body length)