User Tagging/Mentions - How To

(Firstly, to clarify what I mean when I use certain terms in this post, my 'username' is Cribbage and my 'simming name' is RG Cribb).
---

As many of you noticed, yesterday I introduced user tagging. This works simply by using the @ character, followed by a user's username. So if I were to type @ Mousey without the space in between the @ and the M, it'd come out [MENTION=66]Mousey[/MENTION]. Moreover, it'd send Mousey a notification that someone mentioned him in this thread!

I quickly discovered, however, that this messed up the simming name links we used. It used to be that if I typed @AJ Son, it'd link to Mousey's CricSim player profile on the stats site. This was useful for many reasons.. but the user tagging complicated this because, for example, when I tagged <a href=http://cricsim.com/site/players.php?id=85>SM Green</a>, it thought I was tagging the user [MENTION=20]SM[/MENTION] . As I result, I have changed the @'s in these links to %'s. If you used any quick little shortcuts for images etc (looking at you, [MENTION=87]HeathDavisSpeed[/MENTION], [MENTION=512]morgieb[/MENTION] and [MENTION=37]El Nino[/MENTION] ), these also now begin with % rather than @.

The reason the forum was down for a couple of hours last night was so I could replace all the @'s in people's previous posts in the database with %'s. The replace queries took a lot of time given we have over 2,000,000 posts on the forum.

To summarise:

@ + Cribbage = [MENTION=1]Cribbage[/MENTION] : links to my forum profile, notifies me
% + RG Cribb = <a href=http://cricsim.com/site/players.php?id=37>RG Cribb</a> : links to my stats site profile, does not notify me

 

@CricSim Herald

 

Lots of people were in the post originally; I kept editing it to figure out which users weren't working.

 

@Fiery