Hmm, that's odd. Nobody will receive a ping for System (if it has an inbox, nobody sees it), but the behavior should be consistent.

As for the underlying question, you can flag comments that are no longer needed. System isn't immune to deletion; moderators can clean up a chain of those if it took a few tries to get the name you wanted.

That's kinda the intended behavior - it used to be impossible to constrain search to the system user either. But I agree, it's better to be consistent here - it's a user, after all, even if it's a special one. The change is also straightforward - we just need to tweak the matcher to account for negative ids.

Monica Cellio‭ and Oleg Valter‭, thanks. Originally, I posted this in case you ever wanted to implement more accounts with negative identifiers. However, in retrospect, that's a little presumptuous.

As for the underlying question, you can flag comments that are no longer needed. System isn't immune to deletion; moderators can clean up a chain of those if it took a few tries to get the name you wanted.

I posted posts/294924 before I saw your comment. ¹ Hopefully, it still has some merit regardless.

1. comments/thread/11188#comment-27773 ↩

Yup, I wanted to mention that the change will also future-proof against mentions not working if we add more types of special users for some reason, just decided not to include it in my response to avoid overloading it :) Already done - as usual, will take a while to actually land in prod, but that's just a matter of time: https://github.com/codidact/qpixel/pull/1888

Thread renamed from "Hmm, that's odd. Nobody will receive a ping for System (if it has an inbox, nobody sees it), but t..." to "Odd - nobody will receive the ping, but should still render" by Monica Cellio‭

System‭ hello system.