Special User Sections > Site/Forum Features
Discussion of ignore feature
wraith808:
Thanks for the tip @wraith808. I remember another on mouser gave for display of all mesgs in one long page, I forgot.
-anandcoral (June 13, 2017, 01:57 AM)
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Well, one tip - I've noticed you using the @ syntax in several thread. It doesn't do anything.
anandcoral:
Thanks for the tip @wraith808. I remember another on mouser gave for display of all mesgs in one long page, I forgot.
-anandcoral (June 13, 2017, 01:57 AM)
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Well, one tip - I've noticed you using the @ syntax in several thread. It doesn't do anything.
-wraith808 (June 13, 2017, 11:38 AM)
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Ahh....actually I saw members addressing each other with @<nick_name> in another forum and thought that was way, so started doing it. May be it had some meaning / auto link etc. on that forum. Anyway will not use '@' now. Thanks for pointing the mistake.
Regards,
Anand
IainB:
@anandcoral:
Re: Use of the "commercial at" symbol "@" as a prefixed Tag: You are not "making a mistake". For the purposes of improved communication, it is taught as being quite useful (depending on one's objectives in making the communication). This is typically useful within the context of circumstances where the classic communications model applies.
I guess I would probably not be alone in using the prefixed Tag @NAME as a learned behaviour - to be used both as a courtesy and (more importantly) as a tool/protocol for identifying and getting someone's attention for communication, and providing for an acknowledgement and response path, as required - a sort of conventional "AT/ACK" equivalent protocol in human communication. This was simply as a result of my professional training, where I learned that it can be useful for communicating across large, diverse discussion groups/listservers/forums, where there may potentially be a lot of "noise" and where one may be in a hurry, or does not have the time to read everything and thus needs to sift through the noise in outgoing and incoming messages and thus filter and condense the relevant/important information:
* (a) Usage: It is useful shorthand for directing the comment being posted at a specific, named and unique ID/person on the forum being used - so (say) @anandcoral or @John is addressed to that named handle "of this parish" (of this forum), as it were, not just any "Anand" or "John", and not (say) "@Anand on MajorGeeks" or "@John on Twitter".
* (b) Reduce feedback noise: By being specific, it can thus avoid seeming to make a general comment to nobody in particular and so inadvertently inviting comments from all and sundry. However this is not necessarily always going to be successful, and some people might not get the hint, as, with the breadth of opinions out in the world and in relatively open forums, it may be almost impossible to ensure that one has not posted comments which may be perceived as having inadvertently trodden on someone's toes/paradigms/sensitivities or (say) a sacred cow or other religio-political belief or (depressingly) contradicted someone's perhaps unstated but nevertheless dogmatic and strongly-held-opinions-that-must-be-emphatically-stated-and-enforced-as-rule/truth for us all. There are ample instances where we can see how this can inadvertently start a flame-war or even cause the loss of a political election - e.g., and especially where some news media or other religio-political commentators/communicators amplify the message or add ambiguous "noise" that may be deliberately intended to amplify or even distort the perception of the original message out of context, all out of ulterior motives.
* (c) Filter out noise: It can provide an easy search key/filter for comments one has addressed to various people (with @NAME) and to help to sift through the noise - e.g., in searching through the zillions of posts in one's bazqux feed-reader logs. A potentially huge timesaver in this time where the exponentially growing volume of information is subject to mass and almost instant wide-band broadcast. Interestingly, the marketing strategies developed and advocated at EDS Corp. had presciently and accurately predicted this potential before it arose and so built it in (as attacks and defences) to their excellent and far-sighted VBM (Value-Based Marketing) methodology - especially in the Communications Planning section of VBM. Hats off to the brains at EDS who thought of that. :Thmbsup:
Wikipedia has an interesting general post relevant to the use of the commercial "@" prefix:
The at sign, @, normally read aloud as "at", also commonly called the at symbol or commercial at, was originally an accounting and commercial invoice abbreviation meaning "at a rate of" (e.g. 7 widgets @ £2 = £14). In contemporary use, the at sign is most commonly used in email addresses and social media platform handles. It was not included on the keyboard of the earliest commercially successful typewriters, but was on at least one 1889 model[1] and the very successful Underwood models from the "Underwood No. 5" in 1900 onward. It is now universally included on computer keyboards.
The fact that there is no single word in English for the symbol has prompted some writers to use the French arobase[2] or Spanish and Portuguese arroba, or to coin new words such as asperand,[3] ampersat[4] and strudel,[5] but none of these has achieved wide usage.
The mark is encoded as U+0040 @ Commercial AT (HTML @) ...(more at the link)
- Wikipedia <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_sign>
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ital2:
Aside (topic add-ons continued above):
"to be used both as a courtesy"
Speaking of courtesy in this raided thread (any third-party non-meta content way-off off-topic) is a very, very good one: Thank you for the very good laugh!
IainB:
^^ Ouch! :-[
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