Shortcut for Quick Linking to Channels

Troubleshooting
1

A big thanks to @grundleborg, who recently contributed a pull request that added a shortcut for quickly linking to channels. You can come sign up for our daily builds site to try it out.

This feature is similar to the #channel used in IRC, but in Mattermost # is used for for Twitter Style hashtags. Currently the feature is implemented using an exclamation mark !, but we wanted to have a last discussion to finalize what symbol should be used.

After this feature is released, the symbol won’t be changed, so if anyone has thoughts or comments please comment here soon!

2

I think users first think to do this in # since # already provides clickable links. If this could be integrating into # seamlessly, that might be ideal. ! doesn’t seem very intuitive, but I’m sure users could pick it up after they see it in use.

3

Hey @jasonsmith, another PM for Mattermost here. thank you for your thoughts - I agree with you in that ! doesn’t seem intuitive. We were thinking we may want to save the symbol as a tag for something else more appropriate for an exclamation mark. And yes, adoption may be a bit slow at first, but we hope it will catch on regardless of which one we use. As for having # being used for both channels and actual topic hashtags, we see the system getting confused over whether to link to a channel or a hashtag topic. What do you think of using + or ##? For example:

Let’s go talk about it in +Marketing
Let’s go talk about it in ##Marketing
Let’s go talk about it in !Marketing.

4

I think a plus to ## is that you could have some kind of UI help for users on the first #… something along the lines of “Use one # for a topic, or ## to reference a channel”, which is more discoverable than something like a +. I think a + or something other than # or ## could work if the + is mentioned in the bottom, similar to the formatting syntax info "bold, etc.

5

Cool, thanks for the feedback Jason! Would you say that then, you prefer ## or + to the exclamation mark?

6

I think ## might be marginally better, because we’re not “adding” anything, per se.

7

I imagine once upon a time someone at Twitter was like “I wish there was an easy way to tag conversations”, and someone else was like “Well, in IRC, here is what we do…”

8

Hey everyone, just to give an update, the team has decided on using ~ for channel short-linking. We feel like we want to use ! for another feature in the future (e.g. alerts), and ~ was the best choice as it doesn’t interfere with current or planned features.