Can someone @mention (and thus notify) everyone on the forum in one post? Of course not, just take the first 6 unique mentions.
But what if they edit their post and @mention 6 different people? Easy, edits don't trigger notifications. Well, what if someone forgot to mention someone or typo'd someone's name and they just want to make that edit. Seems pretty lame that they can't fix their mentions.
So if you want to allow the latter but not the former, you need to start tracking historical mentions per post in the database. Which you needed anyway so that someone can't @mention, delete the @mention, and then @mention again to trigger dupe notifications.
And what does the notification actually look like if someone edits a one-week-old post to add a @mention? It's kinda confusing for a user to see "Foo mentioned you in post #123", click the link, and see that the post is a week old. They report it as a forum bug. So maybe you now have some logic that sends a notification with "Foo edited post #123 to mention you." Yet another if-statement.
We both could go on and on.
And this is how every feature goes. They are hard problems without a best solution, only trade-offs.
At least if you're building a generalized forum like phpbb, you're solving a problem that will compound across thousands of users deploying your forum software. Meanwhile my forum was completely bespoke for my community and I couldn't shake the feeling that I was wasting my time.
So then it was tempting to wonder if I should work on generalizing my forum so others could use it. Well, now you're even in the bigger hell of generalizing software in a pond with dozens of formidable competitors in a world where you're pretty certain that traditional forums are slowly dying. Good luck with that.
Can someone @mention (and thus notify) everyone on the forum in one post? Of course not, just take the first 6 unique mentions.
But what if they edit their post and @mention 6 different people? Easy, edits don't trigger notifications. Well, what if someone forgot to mention someone or typo'd someone's name and they just want to make that edit. Seems pretty lame that they can't fix their mentions.
So if you want to allow the latter but not the former, you need to start tracking historical mentions per post in the database. Which you needed anyway so that someone can't @mention, delete the @mention, and then @mention again to trigger dupe notifications.
And what does the notification actually look like if someone edits a one-week-old post to add a @mention? It's kinda confusing for a user to see "Foo mentioned you in post #123", click the link, and see that the post is a week old. They report it as a forum bug. So maybe you now have some logic that sends a notification with "Foo edited post #123 to mention you." Yet another if-statement.
We both could go on and on.
And this is how every feature goes. They are hard problems without a best solution, only trade-offs.
At least if you're building a generalized forum like phpbb, you're solving a problem that will compound across thousands of users deploying your forum software. Meanwhile my forum was completely bespoke for my community and I couldn't shake the feeling that I was wasting my time.
So then it was tempting to wonder if I should work on generalizing my forum so others could use it. Well, now you're even in the bigger hell of generalizing software in a pond with dozens of formidable competitors in a world where you're pretty certain that traditional forums are slowly dying. Good luck with that.