Pinging people is too hard

[turt2live]

Currently the best way to ping someone is to use their display name or user ID and hope that they have push rules set up to catch that. This isn't great, and even paired with matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals#1067 the problem isn't totally solved.

Instead of having to apply regex parsing on event bodies, hoping to catch a keyword, we could use an array of some kind to list the users to mention in the event. We can still keep the more useful push rules, however some of the existing ones would need to be altered to support this mention functionality.

This is one solution for which I'm looking for feedback before bothering to go through with a formal proposal:

A mentions array be added to every event listing the user IDs to ping. These user IDs must appear in the body in the format <@userid:domain.com>. This provides a level of backwards compatibility in that it still can ping people on servers/clients that do not recognize the mentions array, and it ensures that people aren't secretly mentioned. The formatted_body should keep the current standard for a pill to ensure it doesn't get lost.

Clients would be able to parse the <@userid:domain.com> if they wanted to make it easier to read, although leaving it as-is isn't the worst.

The reason for not choosing a keyword:userid map for mentions is to avoid abuse where someone says {"cat": "@travis:t2l.io"} and pings several times.

[Half-Shot]

This looks largely fine to me, and solves my problem of bridges not being able to ping people without mutating a nick into a displayname. I assume the intention is to transform <@userid:domain.com> into pills?

[turt2live]

If the client wishes, yes.

[yangm97]

Another issue with the current mention system is that you lose old highlights after changing your name.

[snekmatrix]

i'm told this misdirected pinging is related

[richvdh]

are there any thoughts on how to apply this to e2e rooms?