Proposal for removing unintentional intentional mentions in replies

Signed-off-by: Tulir Asokan <tulir@maunium.net>

proposals/4142-fix-reply-intentional-mentions.md

@@ -0,0 +1,47 @@
+# MSC4142: Remove unintentional intentional mentions in replies
+
+Currently, the reply spec has a section called [Mentioning the replied to user](https://spec.matrix.org/v1.10/client-server-api/#mentioning-the-replied-to-user)
+which says
+
+> In order to notify users of the reply, it may be desirable to include the
+> sender of the replied to event and any users mentioned in that event. See
+> [user and room mentions](https://spec.matrix.org/v1.10/client-server-api/#user-and-room-mentions)
+> for additional information.
+
+The "*any users mentioned in that event*" part is particularly problematic, as
+it effectively means all mentions will be propagated forever through a reply
+chain, causing lots of unintentional pings.
+
+The propagation was originally added to preserve the old reply fallback mention
+behavior where explicit mentions in the replied-to message were be copied to
+the reply fallback and therefore caused pings. However, the current spec copies
+far more than just explicit pings from the replied-to message. Additionally, no
+other chat application that I know of propagates mentions like that.
+
+## Proposal
+The proposed fix is to stop propagating mentions entirely. The `m.mentions`
+object of replies should only contain explicit mentions in the new message,
+plus the sender of the replied-to message. The mentions in the replied-to
+message are ignored.
+
+## Potential issues
+Users who have already got used to the new behavior may be surprised when they
+don't get mentioned by reply chains.
+
+## Alternatives
+### Split `m.mentions`
+To preserve the old reply fallback behavior, `m.mentions` could be split into
+"explicit" and "implicit", so that replies copy explicit mentions into the
+implicit list. Future replies would then only copy new explicit pings and
+wouldn't cause an infinite chain.
+
+Since other chat applications don't copy pings at all, having a weird feature
+like that doesn't seem worth the additional complexity.
+
+## Security considerations
+This proposal doesn't touch anything security-sensitive.
+
+## Unstable prefix
+Not applicable, this proposal only changes how the existing `m.mentions` object
+is filled for replies.
+