Remove differentiation between "directly addressed" vs. "mentioned" in To-Dos
Current situation
We currently determine whether a person was directly addressed or mentioned purely based on whether the other person put my username at the start of a line.
Directly addressed | Mentioned |
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I was very confused about that differentiation when I joined, even more when I saw that there was no functionality associated with that differentiation besides from me being able to filter my To-Do List on this aspect.
We do have an explanation in the docs for this, but even colleagues I spoke with who work at GitLab for multiple years did not know about that differentiation, and instead assumed the difference between addressing and mentioning would be based on e.g. if you are writing a group vs. a single user, or whether /cc was used.
Problem
Having this differentiation is currently causing more confusion than it is adding value. Additionally, the underlying idea only works if every teammember constantly adheres to this idea of how to structure your sentences, which prescribes a certain way of communication solely for the way this feature is set up.
To make the feature work, people have to adapt to how we think they should talk to each other, which might even create problems in other cultures. Languages are structured in very different ways and a certain structure can have different meanings in other languages. As a global and diverse company that has users all over the world, we should avoid tying a feature like this directly to the structure of our language.
As a final aspect, there was also some confusion with the word "addressing", as there are cases where a group that you are member of is being mentioned at the beginning of a line. The To-Do would then say you were addressed directly, which is very confusing, as users associate the word "directly" more with whether you were ping as a single user vs. as part of a group.
Proposal
Currently the only advantage we gain by this feature is being able to filter the To-Do list between these two cases. I have never seen anybody use this to organize their tasks this way, nor did anybody I talk to so far think this would be valuable for them, as they would have to convince every single member of each project they work with to stick with these rules for communicating for this feature to actually work.
Seeing the confusion it already caused and the minimal advantage it brings, I would propose to remove this distinction completely and just use "mentioned". We can then create a new issue to look at the deeper problem of what this feature was supposed to achieve and how to solve this.