I’d love to be able to click on someone’s message and reply to it. It might not need to be very smart. Maybe just add a little "In reply to " above it. Possibly without the outline that messages and whispers have, so that it doesn’t add much extra visual clutter to public chats.
At first I was like; eh?
But then. Yeah. Of course!
But not by clicking. I imagine a command, behaving very similar to a whisper:
reply Accipiter =:looks at that awesome wolf.
But the message is posted to the entire room (but still as a targeted message that may trigger notifications):
What should the command be called, as it doesn’t need to actually be a reply:
- reply (alias r )
- to (alias t)
- target (alias t)
- …?
Great suggestion!
/Accipiter
PS. “In reply” to actual previous message may be more tricky, as the server has no clue about any previous messages; no communication (except mail) is logged for privacy reason.
FurryMUCK has this in Say. You add ?name to the start of a say, and it directs it.
"?accipiter = Hi there!
returns
Windchaser says, “Hi there!” to Accipiter.
It also will fail if Accipiter has left. “I can’t see that here.”
So perhaps adding ?name as a syntax to say/pose that will put a superscripted ‘to name’ above them would work? Can probably do without the ‘are they actually here’ check.
Edit: Make it ?name = because of spaces in names, the = can delimit it. Also if we skip the check part, someone could use it like:
say ?the universe at large = I hate saurkraut!
I didn’t know that!
Nice, albeit a bit cryptic looking. Maybe, if people migrating from FurryMUCK would appreciate it, we can alias it like that.
I am currently leaning towards the command adress:
Both FurryMUCK style and the adress alias would have the same length:
"?Accipiter = Hi there!
vs
a Accipiter = Hi there!
Or even shorter if the same character is adressed twice:
a = You OK, Acci?
The command style is more consistent, and it is more simple to write a help section for it.
But, I will not support “the universe at large” - it must be a valid character 
/Accipiter
“address” or reply both sound great! The “to Accipiter” in your first image was pretty much exactly what I was imagining. Personally, I’ve never been a fan of the ones that automatically format your post in a certain way, since you have to ‘learn’ those commands, and it feels awkward if it has an unintended result. I think, from a user perspective, the complexity scales with the number of possible formatting options they have to speak with.
I’m immediately prone to make a character named HREF so people can use “a” to reply to me. 
Just realized that adress is a misspelling! 
I will rename it to address in a fix release.
The ones? Not sure what sort of commands you are referring to here 
.
Hehe, if I see one, I know who it is then! 
Oh, I meant the commands on other mucks where it adds formatting like surrounding your comment with quotations or adding, “, to name.” at the end. It always felt a bit restrictive to me. Like, if I added a little ASCII emoji or something, suddenly it feels weird since it forces my entire pose into quotations as if spoken. Just putting the little “to name” above the line feels very flexible while still achieving the same goal! n_n Love it!
Thanks for the feature; that was so fast!
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What if we had this reply feature autocomplete something in the text input along the lines of:
'reply accipiter =: ’
or you could have a dropdown of different types of messages
‘p/reply/focus/message’ and the user can choose what sort of message to send.