Thanks to a plugin that interfaces with our social networking system, the @mention feature is now easier to use.  If you’re not aware, you can use Twitter-like functionality (aka @mentions) to reference another user on our site.  The trouble with it is that you must use the member’s username, even though you usually only see them by their first name.  So for instance, even though you’d see my comments and discussion posts as written by “David”, in order to @mention me, you would type @crabilld.

The new feature on the site makes it easier to know when you’re correctly @mentioning someone.  All you need to do is type @ and then the first letter of the username, and a list will popup below the text box with potential users to reference (listed by first name).  So you still need to know their username, but if you can’t remember all of it, this will help ensure that you get it correct.  To find someone’s username, you can just go to their member page, where it is below their name.  You can find members in the Members Directory.  A faster way to get a username is to hover over a link to their page, and look at the URL, which contains the username.

The @mentioning feature is available in the discussion area, activity stream, and comments.

David Crabill

Since day one, we’ve had a great plugin installed that brought popup references to the Bible citations on our site. But you also wanted links for all those Science and Health citations too. Today, we’re adding link functionality to those references, so you can read the quotes in their original context on spirituality.com.  In the spirit of the feature, here’s a S&H reference for you:

Science & Health w/ Key to the Scriptures, by Mary Baker Eddy: 560:4 the

David Crabill

On tmcyouth.com, we used Chatroll to manage our chat box on events like our Live Chats.  To sign in to chat, you needed to create a Chatroll account, sign in as a guest, or login with Facebook or Twitter.

Now on time4thinkers.com, we’re still using Chatroll to manage our chat box, but you can use your account on our site to sign in instead.  A big focus for time4thinkers.com was to streamline everything together into one experience, so now the username you have for commenting is the same one you have for the discussion area, your activity updates, and now the chat box too.  You can still sign in as a guest if you prefer, but we hope that by allowing everyone to sign in more easily, we can connect with each other to form a close-knit community.

David Crabill