chat post witih many @ mentions does not have links, does not give feedback about no notifications

[Alys]

Habitica has a deliberate limit (5) on the number of people you can @ mention in a chat post and still have all the @ mention features work correctly:

habitica/website/server/libs/highlightMentions.js

Line 9 in ed25afb

if (mentions !== null && mentions.length <= 5) {

When you include more people than that, the names aren't converted to profile links and notifications aren't sent out.

I believe the absence of notifications was done to avoid spam and/or too many push notifications sent at once which might overload the server, however it affects legitimate posts too. The limit is not documented anywhere in Habitica and there's no warning given when you've exceeded the limit, leading to confusion and bug reports like the one at the bottom of this issue.

Ideally, if you mention more people than the limit, you'd receive a warning either before you post or just after you've posted to let you know that the people haven't been notified. Seeing the warning before you post the message would be most useful of course, but getting one afterwards might be easier to code (e.g., add it to the same place that checks how many people are mentioned) and would work for all platforms at once. You could then copy and delete your post and resend it in smaller chunks to avoid the limit.

As a simpler alternative, the limit could be written somewhere around the chat box so that players know about it.

Separately from those ideas, when there's more the 5 @ mentions, the names could still be converted to profile links. I don't think there'd be a disadvantage to having multiple profile links in one post, and the links are useful.

I'm marking this as suggestion-discussion for us to work out how this could be improved.

This is the bug report we received from Lorem Ipsum / @loremi (64d5d2fa-4ab1-4ff2-bc93-e46a18d44b25):

Hi, not sure whether it's a bug or a spam prevention feature, but is there a limit on how many people you can ping via @ mention in a chat post? I'm writing long critique posts in the Pixel Power guild tagging lots of people, but I think for the third time now the names in my posts aren't clickable and I'm guessing people didn't get notified. I asked a member who said they didn't get a notification (from a post in which I tagged 10 people).

... I also composed a test post ... with only @ mentions tagging 6 people, and the links turned out not clickable for me.

@loremi's posts were certainly ones that notifications would would have been appropriate for.

[therealmaxmoon]

Separately from those ideas, when there's more the 5 @ mentions, the names could still be converted to profile links. I don't think there'd be a disadvantage to having multiple profile links in one post, and the links are useful.

I find this a really good idea, because in some challenges I create high score boards automatically and have dozens of people in the list and it would be very nice to be able to visit their profiles by a click to see if they already won one of those challenges or to contact them to ask questions about their scores, etc. Otherwise it isn't even possible to figure out their profiles (without the uuid).

I tried to generate those links automatically, but this isn't possible, because I reach the limit of 3000 characters pretty fast, because of long links.