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The dot(.) in username within first 3 character preventing from comment replies?

Because I never got replies from anyone else using that feature.

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3 Answers 3

up vote 4 down vote accepted

Ooops, I misspoke in this answer. Apologies.

This was a long-standing bug of too-strict matching on @foo -- it now uses the proper valid username character set to match, [\w'\.\-].

Will be fixed in next deploy, within a few hours.

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Oh, Thank you very much Jeff. –  YOU Jun 2 '10 at 5:44
@Jeff: The underscore _ is missing in your character set although it's valid in user names and appears to work just fine in comment notifications. I'm not sure, however, if I should add _ or \_ to your list. –  Hendrik Vogt Sep 2 '11 at 12:50
@hendrik \w includes underscore. See regular-expressions.info/reference.html –  Jeff Atwood Sep 2 '11 at 13:00
@Jeff: Ah, great, thanks a lot! I only looked at man grep on my linux console, where I didn't find that. –  Hendrik Vogt Sep 2 '11 at 13:03

I had forgotten about that, but yes, apparently either the FAQ or the implementation need updating.

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Note that trailing dots (though valid in a user name) are removed before matching.

Hence Thanks, @name. matches both Name. with the dot, and Name without the dot. But: @R. is too short to notify R. Smith.

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The last part is not true, @R. does very well match R. Smith (we obviously don't remove the trailing period if that would leave just one letter; that wouldn't make any sense). My point in that comment was just that it may not be the best idea to always strive for the shortest possible combination of letters to reply to someone. –  balpha Jan 28 '11 at 6:35

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