mentions Archives

The Twitter Mentions As Comments plugin is a neat way to harvest all the tweets referring to your WordPress posts and display them as comments on your site. The workflow is identical to the comment workflow on your site, and is controlled in Settings>>Discussion. You configure how notifications, comment moderation, and author whitelists/blacklists work. The plugin gets the poster’s real name and profile picture and links directly to the original Tweet. And best of all, it does it automatically.

After activating the plugin, you’ll notice an entry added to your Dashboard Settings tab. Here you can control the way the plugin operates:

If you tweet about your posts, you might what to blacklist your own Twitter account to avoid getting comments from yourself.

For support, check out the plugin’s site on GitHub.

One way to include particular members into a conversation on the Commons is to use their username with a ‘@’ in front of it. You may have noticed in both the screenshot from Facebook and the Academic Commons that a “friend/member” was hyperlinked in the update. While the “tag/@mention” process is done somewhat differently, it has the same effect — it links others to the profile of the individual while notifying the individual of the mention via email. This @mention system was first implemented by Twitter, but has been adapted by Facebook and now us!

If you are trying to reach out to specific group members, simply put the @ symbol in front of their username and it will send a notification to their email address. This is a great way to bring members into conversations that can otherwise be easily overlooked in the frenzy of Web2.0 information overload. Don’t know a member’s username? Just go to their profile page and their @handle will be listed directly below their name.

Introduction

On the Commons, you can receive a lot of notifications. And all this is good. You want to know when someone accepts your request to become a friend or when someone posts on a blog you’re following or when something happens in one of your groups.

Some events trigger notifications at the top right corner of the Commons screen, in the dropdown menu. Clicking on “Notifications” will display friendship and message notifications. Other events trigger email notifications.

But before going any further, you may want to ensure your email notifications are going to the right address. See how to change your email address.

The following sections describe how to understand and configure notifications on the Commons.

Email Notifications

Members don’t need to constantly login to the Commons to check for news. Members can receive email notifications about new messages, updates to discussions, and new topics on a group forum. The emails will contain hyperlinks that will take you directly to the related Commons page.

To configure, go to Account Settings>>Notifications

Below is a screenshot showing the variety of events that you may choose to get notified about. Please note that you may configure how you wish to be notified when group discussions occur by individual group names. Each group you belong to is listed here, and notification control is quite granular.

Site Notifications

Notifications on sites include comments, posts, trackbacks, and mentions. The first three events are handled by WordPress, while email notification of a mention (i.e. @username) is handled by the process described above. Also see @Mentions, below.

Here is a screenshot of the Discussion Settings in the WordPress dashboard:

You may also want to check out Spam to better understand this annoyance.

@Mentions

Mentions on the Commons are similar to Twitter mentions. You may want to mention someone in a blog, group forum or profile post, and it is easily done by adding an ampersand before their Commons Id. For example, my ID is scottvoth and to mention me, type @scottvoth.