Dear Admins,

No idea if this is technically easy to do or not. But it would be an interesting addition to this forum if people were notified that you refer to their work.

For instance today I referred to Ralph Otterpohls' work. It would be neat if you could somehow highlight his name (as he is also a forum user) and then he would get an email, notifying him that his work is discussed in a topic (sort of like tagging in facebook). That way it will be easier to add a person to a discussion that you know they could contribute to, even if it may not seem that way from the subject header.

Kind regards

Marijn

Dear Marijn,

This is an interesting idea. Although I don't think this forum could have the same functionality as on facebook, where it can be done easily. Also, it could create annoying automatic alerts or e-mails which people don't want to receive.

But rest assured that as the administrators or community managers, we do a lot of that sort of alerting offline in the background manually. E.g. if I see a posting that touches on the work of people like Ralf Otterpohl, Wolfgang Berger or Chris Buckley, then I do tend to send them a quick e-mail and encourage them to write a reply on the forum... This is part of the role of a community manager, and anyone else can do it, too, e.g. if you know the person in question.

One option that would help with your idea is if the forum had an internal e-mailing system, so that you could e-mail another person who has posted on the forum even if you don't know their e-mail address. But again we have to check if it would be worth the programming effort or if people would anyhow overlook such internal e-mails if they don't log in regularly. (it would however reduce the need for posts where one member asks the other member for his or her e-mail address).
For people who don't mind their e-mail address to be shown and are not afraid of additional spam (having a good spam filter!), you can always include it in your footer as well, by the way (like I have done).

Regards,
Elisabeth

@Elisabeth: I think you are doing a wonderful job as a dedicated community manager!

@Marijn: great idea!

Maybe it could be done by using the RSS feed of the forum (which delivers the latests posts), check for keywords/names and then trigger an action based on that, maybe via Yahoo!Pipes or IFTTT.com.

Edit: it is possible to have this but it requires everyone to set it up on their own. I've just taken the RSS feed of the forum and parsed it through a filter at ifttt.com. So from now on, whenever the word "saniblog" (or any other keyword I select, even list of keywords) appears on the forum, I will receive an e-mail. Neat!

Edit2: this works really well. IFTTT est très cool! ==> ifttt.com