Make trailing : into a setting

[SimonBrandner]

Fixes element-hq/element-web#16682
Type: enhancement

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Currently, when a user mention gets inserted at the start of a message a trailing : also gets inserted. This pull request adds a per-account setting (Insert a trailing colon after user mentions at the start of a message) which defaults to off to make this behaviour optional.

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The reasoning behind this is from element-hq/element-web#16682 though I shall attempt to summarize it here.

This is a behaviour that was taken from xchat and other IRC clients. While this is friendly to IRC users it might not be so great for non-IRC users. AFAIK, this has been known to confuse a couple of people including me. While Element can serve as an IRC replacement, it is often used as a replacement for many other services (mainly Slack, Discord and MS Teams and similar). Most of those services do not have this behaviour (Discord, Viber, What's App, Slack, Gitter, FB Messanger, MS Teams, Telegram...), so it might come as a surprise to people coming from those places.

This all leads me to believe that a solution is to hide this behind a setting so that users that want this can always enable it and new non-IRC users won't get confused

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Here's what your changelog entry will look like:

✨ Features

• Make trailing : into a setting (#6711). Fixes Remove ':' on mention inserts element-hq/element-web#16682. Contributed by SimonBrandner.

Preview: https://pr6711--matrix-react-sdk.netlify.app
⚠️ Do you trust the author of this PR? Maybe this build will steal your keys or give you malware. Exercise caution. Use test accounts.

[ShadowJonathan]

https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/issues/3303 and element-hq/element-web#4883 could be interesting for future alterations.

[ShadowJonathan]

which defaults to off to make this behaviour optional.

I actually think that'll break many existing memory-muscle workflows, so maybe make it opt-out? Else it'll just make it default-off to everyone who currently has an account.

Is it possible in any way to only detect this only for new users? That'd make the most sense imo, though even then it can be confusing when other people "still do" it...

All in all, I think that it definitely should be opt-out if we don't want to break existing users' workflows, it's much of the extent I called for primarily in element-hq/element-web#16682, I think.

Edit: it seems i called for opt-in actually, though now that i'm looking at this actual change, im not so sure about that old sentiment anymore. I'm already happy with this bit here though, making it opt-in is Product's decision, and that can be decided upon later.

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Thank you so much for doing this though :D ❤️

[SimonBrandner]

An option would be to write a migrator - We would make this opt-out for now but when a user would use a version of Element with this being opt-out the setting would get written to their account data, so that if we decided to change this to opt-in in the future old users wouldn't be affected

[turt2live]

code looks fine, though I do have concerns about settings proliferating and causing maintenance burden.

[MadLittleMods]

I do have concerns about settings proliferating and causing maintenance burden.

-- @turt2live, #6711 (review)

This feels like something we should just be opinionated on and avoid adding a setting. Convention over configuration

[SimonBrandner]

If it were up to me, I would just remove this feature but I know some people care about having it quite a lot and therefore I've made it into a setting

[ShadowJonathan]

@MadLittleMods see element-hq/element-web#16682 for more context, there was some contention over this, and i think a good compromise to get this working at least one way or another is to make it into a setting, thus this PR.

[jakewb-b]

I'm happy with this proposal - I'm personally keen to be able to turn this off as I find it an annoyance (albeit a minor one), and I agree that given that it seems to be a contentious change, a setting isn't a bad way to go for now.

But, the question of opt-out (of showing trailing colon) or opt-in is tricky, as opt-out doesn't do much to reduce the confusion for users from non-IRC services, but opt-in will likely irritate users who are used to this.

Can we go with this:

We would make this opt-out for now but when a user would use a version of Element with this being opt-out the setting would get written to their account data, so that if we decided to change this to opt-in in the future old users wouldn't be affected

And revisit this in the future to look at switching to opt-in in the future, by which time regular users will have the setting written to their account data, so only new users will be affected.

[SimonBrandner]

@jakewb-b, thank you for taking a look at this! I'll have a look into adding a mechanism that will allow us to make this opt-out now but opt-in in the future

[SimonBrandner]

We would make this opt-out for now but when a user would use a version of Element with this being opt-out the setting would get written to their account data, so that if we decided to change this to opt-in in the future old users wouldn't be affected

@jakewb-b, we should be doing this now ✔️

[jakewb-b]

Thanks for the work on this @SimonBrandner. I'm happy with it, as an opt-out setting which in future we can look at switching to opt-in, to try and ease the UX-shock to people who are used to this way of working.

[turt2live]

looks great - thank you :)