Yeah so last Saturday I decided to learn ASP. Previously, I was working on a PHP/MySQL textboard, but I dumped that project so I could move my site to an Windows server. And this is what I've been working on for about 4 days: http://quivr.net/vip/index.asp

What it has:

• Threads
• Replies
• Thread Bumping
• Saging
• MSSQL Database support
• Thread List/Archive
• Admin Panel
• Filters out HTML

What it needs:

• Tripcodes
• BBcode
• Various other features

So what do you guys think? I'll release it as open-source once all the bugs have been worked out.

>>29-36 what happened here?

>>28

>One of the most difficult-to-accomplish parts of software design is getting things to do what people expect without requiring them to read stuff first.

There is a simple way to solve this problem that phpBB/etc forums already use. They have little javascript buttons for italics, bold, etc. that add the necessary open/close tags when you click them. Sure, it may clutter up the area around the postbox a little, but it allows people to learn how to use the site's formatting as they format their posts.

I don't like all of the bad rap that BBCode gets, so allow me to make a few arguments for and against its usage.

Positives:

• Most English-speaking people have already come into contact with BBCode at some point from a registration-style forum, so there is already some familiarity
• While sanitized HTML does get the job done similarly well, the benefit of BBCode is that you can make up new tags for common text formatting features that aren't directly accessible (i.e. cannot be used with a single, short tag) with HTML. The best example I can think of for this is the [spoiler] tag seen on many boards, something that you can't easily do with sanitized HTML without spreading some kind of misinformation about there really beings a <spoiler> HTML tag.
• As others have said, site-specific markups tend to (of course) vary between other sites, so you either have to guess about what the site is using, or open up the site's guide every time you forget. While this isn't a huge pain, it's much more obvious when the site says that it is using BBCode that the [b] tag is going to be bold, [i] means italics, etc.

Negatives:

• If you're writing a post with a lot of formatting, it does get to be a pain writing all of those brackets and whatnot. And don't get me started on how long it takes to type [spoiler][/spoiler]! Once you remember which combination does what, surrounding text with asterisks or underscores or whatever is much quicker.

Apart from that, I guess the decision is just a matter of personal choice. Both (all three, if you count sanitized HTML) have their own benefits. This is a minor bit of my own preferences, but when I'm using a site that has a custom markup format, I'm always a little afraid that the site isn't going to recognize that, say, a sentence surrounded by asterisks isn't going to be bolded/whatever'd. Since asterisks are used (comparatively) somewhat often in writing, it makes a part of my brain scream "those don't belong there!" when I write them. "How will the computer know that I'm trying to bold that whole sentence? I could see if it was just a word surrounded by them, but there's spaces and how can it keep track of that?!" Even if I'm familiar with the way that the site processes text (I do realize that this whole sentence is going to be bolded, and that a parser just waits for a close sequence after detecting an open sequence, no matter how "far away" it is), I can't change the fact that writing like that feels just a little bit wrong to me. On the other hand, the brackets (other than parenthesis) are rarely used in text, so the sight of a <b> or a [b] is immediately recognized as something that the computer is going to parse. Maybe I just don't post on kareha/wakaba boards enough these days?