Mentioning someone in a normal discussion board list will not show the activity on the user's my-site under “NewsFeed”>>“Mentions” section

Question

I am working on a sharepoint farm 2013 on-premises, and i am facing this problem:-

1. i added a new team site collection, and i enable the publishing features.
2. then i add a new discussion board list.
3. but when i try to create a new discussion board item, and i type @ inside the item body, to mention someone nothing happen (no users were auto-completed).
4. so i read about this issue, and seems that i have to enable the "community site" feature.
5. now when i enabled the "Community Site Feature", i have noted that a new discussion board list have been created, but which look like a community, and not just a normal discussion list.
6. so now i have these 3 lists inside my team site
   • NewsFeed
   • the Discussion board app which i added
   • the Discussion board app which get automatically created after enabling the "Community Site Feature".

now i can mention any user inside the 3 apps, by typing @ and selecting the username. but seems mentioning someone inside the Discussion board app which i added, will not be shown as an activity inside the user's my-site under "NewsFeed">>"Mentions", while mentioning the users inside the NewsFeed or inside the the Discussion board app (which get automatically created), will show the activity inside the users "Mentions" area.. now the issue in my case that we already have a discussion board list with many items, and our customer asked us that they need to be able to mention users inside the discussion items, and to show the activity inside the "Mentions" ares.. so not sure if this is thing we can have inside the current discussion board ?

This is the "Mentions" section i am talking about:-

Answer 1

It doesn't appear possible - Discussion boards are only a list that are just styled differently to appear like a threaded discussion. @Mentions and #Hashtags aren't compatible.

See this post for more information > https://sharepointmaven.com/newsfeed-or-discussion-board/

It also would appear that if you created the discussion board PRIOR to activating Community Site Feature, your new discussion boards will have this capability, but not previous ones - which is what you seem to be experiencing. See > https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/ie/en-US/bb28b142-58cc-4657-a440-028fd16bb45d/mentions-in-discussion-board-not-working?forum=sharepointgeneral

Not sure a workaround for this - if you have items in your 'legacy' discussion board, someone might be able to code something up to migrate them to your 'new' discussion board, but that's not something I can help with, I'm afraid, but here are some posts that might assist:

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/office/en-US/c584e755-af9d-4725-8caa-d842a5dd15e0/programmatically-move-discussion-from-one-discussion-board-list-to-another?forum=sharepointdevelopmentprevious

https://microscoff.com/2010/08/25/moving-a-sharepoint-discussion-to-another-list/

Not sure if the SharePoint Site Content and Structure move / copy will work - with all the metadata and replies intact, but if you want to see how to do that see here > https://support.office.com/en-us/article/work-with-site-content-and-structure-30fcaad9-02b1-4347-8b03-e1ccc5a4c19f?ocmsassetID=HA010131723&CorrelationId=d427a7c0-e409-44cf-a25e-e0cf478976ba&ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US

Hope that helps.