We've rolled out another major update for Hoop.la, this one focusing on support for mentions, whereby you can specifically reference a community member so that they can be notified about the post.  This was one of our most voted-on suggestions in our development queue.

To use mentions, type an @ symbol and then begin typing the displayed name of the person you wish to reference.  You'll see a dropdown menu of potential matches on the name. Select the proper person and a mention link will be auto-generated.  Once you make the post, that person will receive a special notification about the post.

Note that @mentions are only supported in posts, not in subjects, and are not supported in chat room/event posts currently.    Also note that users control whether they want to be notified about mentions in their notification preferences (the default is to be emailed about mentions, however).

Other New Features In This Release

Linkedin: we now support LinkedIn as a social network.  The integration with LinkedIn as not as feature-rich as our other supported social networks, simply because of limitations in terms of what LinkedIn supports, but you can use this user logins and to link to LinkedIn profiles.  You cannot pull in content from LInkedIn, however.

Usernames in Profile URLs: we no longer use number IDs in user profile URLs.  Instead, we use the user's actual displayed name (or as close an approximation as we can, given that only certain types of characters are supported in URLs).

Numeric and Email Address Custom Field Types: for both custom profile fields and database fields, we now support these two new field types.  This can be especially useful for databases, since you can search for numbers between certain values.

There are numerous other minor improvements and bug fixes included in the software update, which has now been deployed to all customers. For questions or assistance, please post to our support site.

Enjoy!