Special Character (!) no longer supported in tags on Desktop

[JohnLi]

Hi,

I have noticed that some of my tags are breaking on desktop. I think this is related to another issue:

Dot in tags no longer working

I used dots inside of my tags, for example: #project.t #project.r Etc. Since today, this is no longer working. I didn’t find anything in the changelog about this. Did this behavior change? I guess I’ll have to switch to another symbol like #project-r or #project-r

Expected Behaviour
I expect that typing #!!! will create a tag with #!!!, allowing me to select and filter on all items with this tag.

Actual Result
This created a tag of # !!!, with the exclamation points ignored.
No impact observed on mobile (iOS) apps, which respect the ! as part of the tag.

Impact: Low
This is a breaking change for me but I can (with some difficulty) change my tagging set up. Can you help understand if symbols at the start of tags were intentionally deprecated? Ideally this can be rolled back as I am used to using #!, #!! and #!!! for priority tagging and sorting.

[Shida]

Apologies for this breaking change. Tags were originally not intended to include punctuation, it was a long time bug that we recently fixed. (Mostly talking about #hashtag in general, especially used on twitter) Tags don’t include punctuation in almost every other app, which is why we’re fixing this bug. Here are links to some previous bug reports:

Trailing punctuation included in tags

Including a tag with punctuation immediately after it causes both the tag and the punctuation to be highlighted. For @example, in this sentence the highlighted portion would end up being: @example, This cosmetic detail isn’t very significant and the expected value (without the punctuation) is added to the suggested list; however, clicking on the highlighted label (to do a search) populates the find box with both the tag and the punctuation, and this is unexpected behavior. Steps to reproduce S…

Mentions/tags include common punctuation

Steps to reproduce Use tags and use common punctuation for @ person name mentions, like ? or ) Observe that they show up as separate instances now for tag completion and in tags list Expected result A single @ name tag is created and recognized consistently Actual result Many tags are created for completion and in tag list Environment Chrome macOS, but non-version specific Additional information / comments It seems that including punctuation at least in some cases is by design, based on …

[Shida]

Oh and this hasn’t been deployed to the mobile app yet, but it will be soon.

[JohnLi]

Hey Shida, thanks for the update (sorry about late reply). Even though this broke a previous setup it wasn’t onerous to reorganise how I was doing things.

PS I really appreciate the added context you and Erica always add to these changes, makes the experience of working with the app so much more pleasurable. Keep up the excellent work.