The current solution might not be sufficient.
The current text is useful as a quick reminder for veteran users of the system:
Comments use mini-Markdown formatting:
[link](http://example.com) _italic_ **bold** `code`. The post author will always be notified of your comment. To also notify a previous commenter, mention their user name:
@PeterSmith will both work. Learn more…
(I don't actually recall ever using this, but I know to look for it by starting to edit a post and clicking on "advanced help", which is what I needed to do know how to put a
` in an inline code span. This might be my own quirk.)
Now link formatting in comments is pretty useful and worth including, but I'm not sure about italic and bold. Certainly code formatting is worthwhile on code-related sites (SO, DBA, TeX, etc.), but for non-coding sites (History, Gardening, Writers, etc.) this is just clutter. Further, these tools are likely to be familiar to people who have already learned Markdown in order to post questions or answers. The really unique incantation is obscured at the bottom of the box.
A suggested change to the help text.
To notify a previous commenter of your comment, mention their user name:
@UserName. The post author will always be notified.
Comments use mini-Markdown formatting.
This cuts out a lot of the cruft:
General Markdown formatting is removed.
The key functionality (notifying a previous commenter) is moved to the top.
The link to the general help is more descriptive. ("Learn more..." is a baby-step up from "Click here.")
@UserName is more obviously a generic name than
@PeterSmith. Since many folks don't use their real names, the bit about just using the first name (I know that's not really how it works) could be confusing.
I'm split on whether to include the detail about the post author being notified. This is something that might be intuitive, so explaining it might be unnecessary. An alternate version that excludes it could remind users about inline links instead:
This also allows a bullet point presentation for good or ill.
Graduated help could help.
Currently, the threshold for getting this prompt automatically is 100 reputation. That's convenient because of the site association bonus. (New users are not all created equal.) But it's entirely possible to get 100 points without feeling the need to comment. (Usually this will happen when an enthusiastic user answers 3 or 4 questions in quick succession and comes back the next day with some upvotes on each. In other words, new users we want to retain.)
Raising the bar to 250 or something might help. But I wonder if it would be possible for the system to react to user behavior instead. For instance, the first comment a user makes will have help on how to ping other users. Once a user has employed the
@ notation, the help changes to describe how to embed links inline. (Alternatively, if the user types in a bare link, the help for links could pop up.) As the users demonstrates mastery of aspects of the system, the help prompts for those aspects stop appearing.
My guess is that graduated help will be a much bigger task than simply changing the text. Without solid user testing, it's probably not possible to justify the change. But the Stack Exchange system has become quick complex and difficult to learn for many new users, who are not always the programmer demographic that SO caters to.