@François Robere: This is what it looks like when you ping someone to a page that isn't their own user talk page.
Topic on Structured Discussions/Sandbox
By the way, the pencil icon in the corner will let you switch to wikitext, if you prefer that to this visual editor. It won't accept (i.e., will auto-correct) wikitext that produces incorrect HTML, so if you want to put in broken wikitext, be sure to escape it inside pre tags or nowiki tags.