It has to be the editor that's generating the mention's notification. In that reply from tautech there are two tags, both with the requisite hyperlinks, but they don't trigger a notification (nor do they generate a link in the mentions page). So I think it must be the act of making the tag in the editor which does it.
Nope. This mentions mod for smf is just a kind of a piece of junk. It includes both a client side editor script and a server side parser that do pretty much the same thing, but only the latter actually has any effect, the former is purely for gui convenience in the wysiwyg.
It also includes a permissions system where not everyone seems to be assigned to the group to allow use of mentions, and the implementation is kind of half-assed, which is why:
- some people don't even see the interface for using '@' for mentions in the editor, because they don't have the permission
- but the bbcode used for mentions isn't protected behind the permission, so anyone can create something that otherwise looks like a mention, but will not send a notification
- but the parser on the server doesn't handle quotes, so someone who is allowed to use mentions quoting someone who was not but used the '@' anyway will convert it to one and send the notification
Further, it looks like the mod was written/maintained for a month or so in 2014, but hasn't seen any updates since... so any hopes of seeing fixes/improvements/new features seems like a pipe dream. The only improvement likely would be if the admins can either assign (or unassign) everyone to the permission group consistently so at least it's more understandable.
Anyway, that's about as much reading of atrocious PHP code as I'm gonna do on my Friday evening, maybe it clears up some of the confusion about why the behavior is so unintuitive.