Signal-desktop: Implement @mentions in group chats

[adrianmace]

• [x] I have searched open and closed issues for duplicates

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Description

One of the primary use cases for a rich chat platform is group chats, and often these chats are very 'busy'. It would be great to be able to single out one or many people directly with the use of @mentions - just like your community site as well as gitlab here has done - so that you can break their mute options as if you were messaging them directly, but in the context of the group chat.

This would be excellent to alert them to a message while you know they have the chat on mute, or similar more 'urgent' scenarios.

Expected result:

Including @username in the chat would send those mentioned a push notification and honour the mute/unmute behaviours of the individual instead of the setting applied to the group - that is to say it would often alert the user even if they have the group muted.

[Ralms]

This is definitely a needed feature, specially since a lot of people coming to Signal are used to that in WhatsApp. There is simply no way other than reply (which is recent) to mention someone in a group chat.

[haltdev]

This is my number 1 most wanted feature.

[matthocker]

Absolutely vital to a group chat function. It makes it really hard when you have a group muted for someone to get your attention if this function doesn't exist. Our WhatsApp refugees are all asking for this.

[4mig4]

I also think this is a much needed feature for Slack refugees too.

[soren5]

Bump, trying to transition my friends from facebook messenger to signal and this is a dearly missed feature

[strugee]

Please don't bump issues.

[Ralms]

December 2019 now, 1 year and an half after this request was submitted.
Also highly requested feature by a lot of people in multiple locations.

Any update from Signal team?
Thanks for your work for true privacy.

[Sdaswani]

Any update on this? I so want to leave WhatsApp but this is a blocker. It's needed in order to have effective conversations in larger groups.

[EvanHahn-Signal]

We recently released a new version of our groups infrastructure that supports @-mentions (among other things). Full Desktop support for mentions is coming, but you can use them on mobile in new groups today. Your Desktop clients should have no trouble handling incoming mentions, you just can't send them yet.

We're working on adding this to existing groups in a future update.

I'm not going to close this issue because it's not totally finished on Desktop, but we wanted to give an update!

[Phantomb]

Thanks for the update @EvanHahn-Signal any idea on the timeline on for this feature? :)

[EvanHahn-Signal]

The latest beta of Signal Desktop supports sending @-mentions. Please give it a try!

Also remember that @-mentions only work on relatively new groups; see our blog post for more info here. We're working on adding this to existing groups in a future update.

[EvanHahn-Signal]

@-mentions are now in the latest version of Signal Desktop. I'm going to close this issue because I believe this issue is resolved.

[khimaros]

this is awesome, thank you for your efforts!

[Phantomb]

Evan, just wanted to let you know you were not screaming into the void ;) Directly after your reply to me, I tried out the Desktop Beta, and it works like a charm. Great to see it land quickly in public release.