Hello there, lovely SparkPeople!

Today I get to do one of my very favorite things in the whole world: Announce that we’ve released a feature you’re going to love! It’s literally the best. :)

One of your most frequent requests since we launched the Community Feed back in March was to give you the ability to tag your SparkFriends when you make posts, and to be notified when someone tags you or responds to one of your posts. If you’re an Android user, you might’ve noticed that we snuck these features into an update a few weeks ago, but today we’re pushing this out to all iOS and desktop users too! We’ve also expanded user tagging to our message boards, team boards and team walls as well.

How User Tagging Works

If you hit the “@” symbol and start typing the name of one of your SparkFriends, we’ll start suggesting all of your friends that match what you’ve typed. This will also work if you’re writing a comment to post and want to tag someone else who has commented, or the person who originally made the post. If you’re writing a new post it works a little differently: You can only get tagging suggestions for your SparkFriends, as no one has commented on your post yet.  You can still tag any SparkPeople member l by typing in his or her full username, it’s just that we won’t suggest that name to you.

What Happens When You Tag Someone?

Great question! What happens for you depends on how you use the SparkPeople community.

If you’re a dedicated user of the SparkPeople Mobile App and have notifications for our app enabled, we’ll send you a push notification any time you’re mentioned. Click on the link and be taken right into the community conversation in which you were tagged. If you have notifications disabled, you risk missing that warm, fuzzy feeling that comes baked into each message. So make sure to flip them back on and hop into the conversation.

If the website is more your speed, you’ll get an email from us every time you’re mentioned on the site. Click on the link in the notification, and be whisked right to wherever people have been talking to you. You’ll get this email if you have enabled this option under “Other Friend Feed Settings”, which you can find on this page if you’re logged in. Make sure to flip the option on so you stay in the loop!

We’re thrilled to launch this new feature, but we want to hear from you. Let us know what you think in the comments below and we’ll be sure to respond over the next, few days.