Comments | usernameguy: The FP @reply implementation

usernameguy

The FP @reply implementation

Sep 08, 2009 16:50

My side project, which I'll call FP here, has a @username notification system a la Twitter's on it. The users use it all the time. There are N users total.

It's slightly more flexible than Twitter's. I call it the @reply system. This is a software design overview of that system. It's basically a "how-to". I'll compare it to Twitter's implementation ( Read more... )

Comments 1

usernameguy September 9 2009, 06:34:37 UTC

Someone asked, "Why not just use a regex?" (I think he was thinking of /(@\w+)/ or whatever chars you use for your username). And on FP, the reason was that there were already users with spaces and punctuation in their names.

I had forgot about that.

I thought about removing all the spaces and punctuation in the names in the database, but that'd be an awkward moment with the userbase.

Otherwise, that's much simpler implementation. Keep in mind if you go that route - you need to filter your usernames of not just whitespace, but also punctuation, particularly the '-', ':' and '.' chars.