General > General Technical Chat
How to tag someone in a post?
Nominal Animal:
--- Quote from: PlainName on February 28, 2024, 01:40:32 pm ---
--- Quote ---My suggestion would be to disable it until each member can disable the notification of mentions, or, if possible, just disable the notification only.
--- End quote ---
Why does it need disabling? No-one uses it so disabling would have zero effect at the potential cost of breaking something.
--- End quote ---
Why wait until it is misused? It is not working correctly for all users, either. For most users, within a post the mentions do not change into links, but when such a post is quoted, they do.
Compare to being proactive wrt. spammers. You generally don't want to just remove spam messages, you want to prevent them before they happen. I'm applying a similar logic for this feature here.
I would prefer to keep the useful aspects (i.e., disable only the new mention count next to the Profile button) while discarding the risky or unwanted (by some) aspects, but that would mean additional work.
Just leaving it as-is is the easiest option, but it can bite later on if misused (and I've described how).
The next easiest option is to remove the mentions module, entirely disabling the operation. It is only built-in in the next version of SMF, 2.1; this is 2.0.19 as of 2024-02-28.
Fixing the behaviour so it works for all users and does not have the annoying, potentially misused features, would require the most work, editing the SMF mentions module itself.
tggzzz:
--- Quote from: PlainName on February 28, 2024, 01:40:32 pm ---
--- Quote ---My suggestion would be to disable it until each member can disable the notification of mentions, or, if possible, just disable the notification only.
--- End quote ---
Why does it need disabling? No-one uses it so disabling would have zero effect at the potential cost of breaking something.
--- End quote ---
The unpleasant consequences have already been explained, several times. "SecurityCivil behaviour through obscurity" is always a poor proposition.
T3sl4co1l:
All I see is straw men, imagined risks, with easy defenses, and poor excuses not to use them.
Leave it in.
Tim
tggzzz:
--- Quote from: T3sl4co1l on February 28, 2024, 05:00:08 pm ---All I see is straw men, imagined risks, with easy defenses, and poor excuses not to use them.
Leave it in.
--- End quote ---
I don't see straw men arguments.
There are too many solid very unpleasant counterexamples elsewhere for complacency.
The defences against some aspects are easy, but you can't ensure good taste.
The reasons not to use them are good.
T3sl4co1l:
Dude. The solution to literally every single little thing you've raised here, is... just kindly ask the admins, they'll clean it up.
If someone's abusing the platform... they're abusing the platform, it doesn't matter how. Banhammer. That's the end-all be-all to misbehavior. No making-oneself-a-victim, no political intrigue, no imminent invasion of communism.
The worst possible thing you've even imagined is a, like, first someone would need to either create an army of puppet accounts, hack existing accounts, or find a password bypass exploit; and all just to target one individual with incessant @-ing, like, how self-absorbed does one have to be to think this would actually happen to them--? Obviously, such access would be quickly sold to spammers, the forums polluted with junk posts, no one's even going to look at the tag mechanism. Remember that such access goes well beyond this forum, and would affect all SMFs in the world; that's a big attack surface, and a big spamming opportunity if it sticks.
Or at worst, the whole spampocalypse happens, and they do look at the tag system, and tag literally everyone on the member list. You're not a victim, everyone is.
Either way, you're talking existential nuclear war on the forum as a whole, the @-system is a completely irrelevant piece of the puzzle, and the forum would be locked or shut down and restored from backups, until such time as the holes can be patched. It's a DDoS for everyone, not some measly "My Messages [1]" alert? Give me a fuckin' break, really?!
If you have a readability issue, or sensory processing or whatever, that's fine and understandable; it's also up to you, say to craft a CSS that diminishes or hides such annoyances. If enough users find such annoyance, perhaps integrate them into the plugin -- the correct venue is the SMF people themselves, ask them -- we have very limited ability to customize things here, as I understand it.
Tim
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