Atlassian really likes to invent just another stupid shit and silently deeply it to your Confluence instance together with next update.
Making you hair stand. One of the latest crap is adding @ if you enter a name on the page, that happens to be found in Confluence user directory. Moreover, it sends out emails to all such users telling they were mentioned on the page. All this makes Confluence look like another Facebook, and not that serious business corporate solution Atlassian wants itself to be. Well, we will have to disable mention all together. Go to Admin console, click on Add-ons, enable showing of all plugins and find Mentions. Disable, and you’re done. Now the name is underlined like a hyperlink, leading to the user’s profile page. No more faggotry.
However if you want to keep e-mails when somebody is mentioned on the page and the rest of Mentions functionality, but remove the annoying @, you must disable one of the plugin modules – Mentions Styling (view content).
This will remove the @ but keep all the rest of the plugin functionality.