We’ve made a small tweak to how direct replies to a post are displayed. Previously it would display something like:
Re: Username (Post# 123456)
The problem with this is that we were seeing members use the post# link when trying to link to a specific post, mistaking the link to the post’s parent for the post itself.
We’d considered changing this format to @replies in the past, which some users might be familiar with from twitter, but we backed off because it’s a bit uglier and many of our users weren’t familiar with that convention. However now that more and more sites are using this we’ve switched to displaying the link to a post’s parent as an @reply. This should also help a bit with another usability issue, of using the last post to reply to the thread by making it a bit clearer that direct replies to a post are addressed to a specific user.
So now you will see this displayed like this:
@username,
This can make your post awkward if you are in the habit of starting your post with “username,” as it will then be repeated twice, so we figured we’d give you a quick heads up about the change.