Hi everyone! I'm so excited to announce a HUGE new feature that we just launched today: "@Mentioning" is finally here! At first glance, it might not seem so big, but this is something that's been on our roadmap since Day 01 and a ton of work went into finally building this. Most importantly, I feel this brings a meaningful improvement to Journaly's User Experience and is a big step forward with the community mission of the platform. So grab yourself a tea or coffee and let's talk about it!

What is @Mentioning?

This feature allows you to mention (or "tag") another Journaler within either Post Comments or Inline-Feedback Comments and for them to be notified that you mentioned them. For a social platform that hopes to cultivate such a rich culture of meaningful interactions that support you building genuine connections and friendships, I believe this is a key feature in allowing you to speak to each other directly and to bring other Journalers into a conversation you feel they should be a part of.

How does it work?

As shown below, simply type the "@" symbol and begin typing the handle of the user you want to mention. We've built in User Search functionality so that as you type, you'll see a list of handles that match best and, as you continue to type, the results will continue to be narrowed down. You can use the ↑ ↓ keys to scroll through the results or click on them. Also note that you don't have to choose a search result – if you choose to simply write out the full handle after the "@" symbol it will work fine as long as it perfectly matches an existing user handle, but using the search results helps to ensure an exact match. If you modify the mention handle afterwards or type one that doesn't exist, nothing will explode and at this time there will simply be no notification and the link will lead to an invalid profile.

After you publish the comment, we automatically format the mention as a link that will lead to that Journaler's profile! Below is a real comment I left as a surprise for one of our superstar users and moderators, Linda, moments after we deployed the code this morning! 🎉

Once you publish a comment that contains one or more Mention, each mentioned user will receive an in-app notification letting them know! The notification is quite minimalistic, containing just the headline image of the post, and clicking on that notification will bring you to the post. For Inline-Feedback Comments we automatically scroll you to the correct position within the post and open the thread for you – magic! ✨

So, what do you think!?

As always at Journaly, we really tried to build out a pretty robust version of this feature right from the start. I really hope you will love using it, and that it will bring huge improvements to the usability of the community-side of Journaly. As I mentioned, this has been on the roadmap since we launched the Alpha of the platform back on December 31st, 2020, and over the years as I've watched many of you forming wonderful friendships and having so many great discussions – I've always wished you had the ability to mention each other and bring members of your groups into those delightful interactions sprouting up in threads all over each other's posts.

Well, now you finally do! And as always I'd really love to hear from you and get your feedback. Be part of the conversation in the comments below, and go have fun mentioning each other! 🎈