I am tired of reading through complaints about failed summons in this Help Forum. So now I am going to offer helpful advice.

 I have recently found that while attempting a summon may be as failure ridden as ever - mostly because of how poorly understood the process happens to be - there is a reliable method to make it happen when it has not happened.

 Every single summon I tried this month failed so I set about to examine methods of making it happen. These are derived from tricks I picked up over the years of making the occasional post , putting a great deal of thought into those posts , wanting them to be perfect and represent my user name well since I have not historically done them very often.

 Ahem. Here it is.

 Preparation: Make sure to open the thread you are replying to in a separate tab if you are doing a reply summon to someone or multiple users who already posted. This is so you will have ready access to their user name(s) in formatted thread display. If you are summoning people who are not posters on the specific thread yet, find their user names on the member list and use the search box to locate their profile.
 
 Prior to submitting your post with an attempted summon or submitting an edit for an existing post for which you wish to add a summon, prepare the intended line for the name with the usual space before the colon mark. It also might be prudent to leave at least a few spaces between the colon mark and all other type plus a few safety spaces immediately preceding your target for a copy and paste of the intended user name.

 Next, using the other thread tab or whatever source you can readily derive a direct copy of the target user name, highlight that name with your cursor and either right-click to select copy or simply combine Ctrl and then the letter "C" key. With me so far?

 Great. Now you are ready. Ready for the aim, fire action. Like the commander of a firing line, you will not have enough time to pronounce the word "and" in between the two key commands.

 Go back to your posting or editing tab and this up next is what will make everything work.

 Tip # 1 : Make sure to set your typing cursor to exactly one space behind the colon mark you carefully arranged.
 Tip # 2 : Hover your mouse cursor on the submit button. That way you can save valuable jiffies[ think centi-seconds ] of not having to move your mouse cursor from wherever you had left it otherwise.

 Now the key active action. Here it is:  Ctrl + V followed immediately by submission of your post. Aim fire! That is all it really takes.

 I have done this separately in different edits on the same posts to test many times. It works every time. Every additional user name to be summoned just takes another edit once the earlier ones are done.

 The reason I am advising that people paste the summoned user name immediately before submitting is quite essential to the process of how these user created in site icons work.

 The text you pasted of just their user name starts out as colourized version if it went in right. If you leave it in your edit box more time than it is intended to stay there, the user name will revert to plain text and results in a failed summon if you submit it as plain text. To safeguard against that and make sure it is colourized and perfect, use my [investigated and tested] method which is detailed above.

 If the user name you pasted after copying from the source shows up in your editing or posting box as plain text, redo it. Then follow at once with a submission click to not give it that chance to revert to its plain text version.

 If you accomplished a failed summon, do not make a lame edit to say it failed. Just do what I do and fix it. No excuses. You will now have all pertinent information on this meta-Vizzed subject at your fingertips by navigating to this thread.

: Please make this sticky as a top priority to make sure every person coming here to this forum with this problem has a mere chance to see this thread that actually helps them before they make yet another annoying, whiny complaint thread about it when you usually have more important other things to attend to here.

Postman3: 
lol okay


EDIT: ugh a failed summon

   : Try again. Use the method "properly". You will see that it works. That is why I gave explicit instructions for every action. I forgive you for trolling.
 It has been a long time of abjection and not one person has been able to give a clear answer on how to fix it, evidently.

  In any other thread I might welcome a joke and laugh uproariously. This is a help thread, FunnyFurret. It is designed to help people with solving this incessant woe in the forums.

 Now it is different. This is the real deal. Please try it for yourself.

 Make it more like this.


  :


 I was confident that I could do that. Do you see a discrepancy in what I described myself doing in the thread post and what you did?

 P3

Postman3 : I should remind you that your method does not work.

I did not get a single alert for both of your 'summons' that you presumably edited in. So despite my name showing up all fancy in your post, I was not notified that you had posted a reply to me. Which defeats the purpose of a summon.


Oh and forgive me for having a chuckle. I am of the opinion that humor should be allowed anywhere on the site, including help threads. It lightens up the mood regarding an otherwise dark subject like not seeing a colored username in your reply.

hey... wait... so how do you summon??

  Oh. How fantastic. You have adjusted your settings to not receive any summon notifications. Either that or you are just flatly lying. I would not assume either deception was beneath you, given your inflammatory behavior so far.

 Humour is definitely to be allowed, even when spelled the ignorant American way. I humbly point out that there are times when it is misplaced or does not suit a given circumstance. You would not throw old eggs at a foreign aid worker as a prank when they are out domestically canvassing for funding, would you?

 I do not like the smell of your eggs. Your humour stinks.

  All I am attempting to do is aid people around here in curtailing a minor foible Vizzed inherently has in this posting function. The plaint about failed summons is frequent for people who post and that somehow stresses them out just a little bit. It is no cure all. People will still lack the patience and persistence I easily have to ensure it works every time. Even with the provided advice, people will still do it wrong. When that happens, they will blame the method, not their own poor execution of the steps.

 Why would you stand in the way of getting more information out there when it has a high likelihood of helping people solve a woe?


  : See thread post at the top. Do read it entirely this time. Also, go back to it any time as a reference guide when you are making a post you want to include the summon function in.

 P3

Sweaty Baby :

You just do the thing.

Postman3 : You can NOT adjust your settings to not receive summon notifications. That's just impossible because summons are coded within the site.

I haven't read the entirety of your post, but it kind of reminds me how David sets up the daily results for the TdV thread. The highlighted names appear in the daily results, monthly results and overall results, but you only get notifications for the times your name appears in the daily results. Most likely because daily results are summons and everything else is just a copy/paste with updated numbers.

I've personally used the "traditional" system and it has given me almost perfect results. Maybe what people ignore is the exact procedure to summon through the traditional format or they attempt to do things without having full knowledge of what they are doing. That's mostly why people complain: they don't understand why something fails when they're doing nothing wrong, when in reality they may be doing something wrong. Not all summons work, whatever system you use, and that's also something people need to learn, I've seen users attempting to summon others several times to no avail and no one made a big fuss about it.

Summarizing, while this sharing of your summoning method is very welcome for others to learn and use, it's not like we all have to abide by it. I'm sure it's not perfect, just like the "traditional" one, so you're basically complicating things. It may work with hard-to-type usernames, but the "traditional" method will always be a faster way.

Oh, and before I check anything, the summon at the start was made according to the "traditional" method: typing the username of the person I want to summon at the start of the line followed by a double colon. It may or may not work, but it's so easy to do that I prefer to leave a profile comment if it fails to let that user know they've been summoned.

  :  Thank you for your input.

 By "traditional" system , do you happen to mean the old post editor?

 I generally do not use the old post editor since there are an exceptional number of handy options in the new one. I suppose I could adjust my settings to use the old one by default but I do like where I am at right now. I also hold the old post editor responsible for many unexpected reloads which would always erase everything I had typed to that point. Throwing my hands in the air out of exasperation after typing thousands of words is not how I wanted to decide to give up on typing out game reviews on those particular days.

 I am not expecting anyone to "abide by" the parameters of my advice, I am simply putting it forth so people know that there is a way that works. I have searched for a help thread like this one to make sure I was not redoing the subject but it seems no user has ever made one specifically to help people out of this jam.

 If you could elucidate about "the exact procedure to summon through the traditional format", I am sure anyone taking the concept of "helping people" seriously would welcome the further contribution to the discussion.

 Thank you for not being fussy. That is quite refreshing from what I have typically read in the help forum here.

 In most sites and apps, there are ways to disable notifications for just about everything even if they occur by default. It just so happens that disabling them has not been worked into Vizzed. I see that now. It would be far from impossible to make it a Vizzed utility to disable anything that annoys us. I have learned to never underestimate the impossible.

 Still can't trust a weasel though. They lie. Sometimes just to amuse themselves and other times for personal gain.

 P3

Postman3 : Just to let you know, your summon didn't make it through. Like I thought, your use of copy/pasting isn't read by the system as an attempt to summon and it only highlights the user's name as a link to their profile. Proof of that is seen when you hover over the name of the summoned user: your system shows their info like when you hover over their name in any other page in Vizzed, but the traditional system doesn't show that information, showcasing it's a real summon.

You really have me lost with the "old post editor", because I've never heard of a newer one. And well, I wasn't talking about it, the traditional system is just how we all had it explained and can still be deduced from the Help Center. I've already noted how the method works in my last post, so I won't repeat it here for TdV reasons, but I will elucidate about that "exact procedure" you mentioned.

For the summons to work with that traditional system you must type everything yourself. If you make a typo, forget the double colon at the end or type an old username that right now redirects to no one in the memberlist then the summon will inevitably fail. Even so, the system is not perfect and your summon might fail because it simply didn't go through, like is happening recently with posts or threads, for example.

People complain simply because they don't double check. We see that everywhere, any kind of chat or even in social media. Once they've clicked "Submit", everything's done and gone. If they did double check, the chances of failing a summon because of a human mistake greatly reduce to near zero. In this site we even have the "Spell Check", which will detect and highlight usernames most of the time if they aren't recognized words, giving us another chance of double checking.

EDIT: There was something familiar with your system, and now I know what it is: I saw it being used in old threads, years before I even registered. It doesn't show up as a summon, instead it "freezes the user in the spot", because you'll see that my post count when hovering over my name in your post is outdated after this reply.

Maybe it was you all along using an outdated summoning method that doesn't work anymore. Makes sense given how often you post and for how long you've been here, so I think it's more than a coincidence. Am I right?

Postman3 : I love how you decide to be aggressive after I just point out that your method of summoning won't work with the site coding. Real classy. Hope you're not like that away from the computer.

As someone else who you haven't gone after yet has pointed out, there is no way to disable summon notifications. You can look all over the edit settings page or ask David himself, and you will see that it just isn't possible. I will now provide a screenshot of my notifications page so you can stop acting so condescending whenever someone is genuinely trying to give you feedback on a help thread. 




Next time do your research before you call someone a liar and a weasel.

  Furret :  What can I say? I allowed you to save face after you trolled and now you are doing it again. You aptly point out here people that like it when you troll. The attitude of your feedback has been far from selfless. More irreverence than any significant substance added to the discussion.

 If you had made your feedback more like the post I actually liked, that would have been genuine and helpful. You are a troll for your own amusement and only after being warned about it did you backtrack and now you backhandedly troll.

 So I was right to call you out for your rat fink behavior. Only after that have you done as one should. After this duplicitous nature of yours has been revealed, do you really believe you can con people into thinking you do not lie?

 Ferrets and by extension, Furret are weasels. Thus Furret, you are a weasel by your own choosing.

 You also might want to go back and edit old posts while you still can. Every time I catch you lying, I will draw attention to it.

 The Internet lasts beyond living memory.

 P3

And then that's when the thread is closed and trashed. ^^b