Use markdown on the forums. Simple. It's great and you can limit formatting. The current img and b tags are ok, but headings would be nice too. Markdown is a nice easy way to achieve that without having to redo the entire forum system )or re-encode any current posts).

http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax

Has a good description

Markdown is in use on Stack Exchange if you would like a better example.

What? You've got that backwards, dude. Adding support for a few more bbcode tags would be very simple and would neither require redoing the entire system nor re-encoding current posts. Switching to markdown would require redoing the entire system and re-encoding posts.

@Pizzasgood - nope markdown is designed just for that cause so that there there is no need to redo or replace anything. In fact You could totally convert the entire forum to support markdown in about 3 lines of code and not one bit of extra work.

Assuming python

import markdown2
markdown2.markdown(msg.body)

TADA entire forums converted

Back in the real world this would need some testing and maybe some caching (depending on how they already cache) but that's the basic gist it. *

Actually adding more bbcodes would likely be harder.

* please note that this would actually require some time to implement as there would need to be serious testing around performance hits and caching. Plus the site devs may not want to implement the 10 second approach for various reasons, and may way to add methods to the psudo msg object allowing for cached v.s. on the fly conversion, or any number of other things. But again, a very easy to implement thingy.

** I just want to be clear here, I made it look easy but there would be work involved. That might technically work (the code above) but it might catch the server on fire too. The implementation is very simple, but testing would not be. Again however markdown would not require a single bit of conversion of old posts, it's designed not to.

Yeah, I know all about markdown. I use it to format the stories I am writing. I just didn't realize you intended for them to keep the bbcode engine running alongside the markdown one, which would redundantly replicate existing functionality that we already have, resulting in unnecessary extra code floating about and still needing to be maintained alongside the other code that does essentially the same thing.

Also: you can't just shove all your complexity into footnotes and pretend it doesn't exist. In no way whatsoever would adding markdown be simpler than adding new bbcode tags. If we didn't already have support for bbcode, it would be another story, but we do.

" If we didn't already have support for bbcode, it would be another story, but we do." No we don't we have fake bbcode. Because 10 years ago it was popular. There is no (that I can tell) real bbcode parser in place. Instead there is a regex/substring/replace thiny in place that could be just as difficult to extend, maybe even more so, then implementing markdown.

And my footnotes, are more of an attempt to be honest about the situation, then trying to shove complexity out of the way. It would not be hard to implement, it could be hard to test. But it wouldn't be any harder to test then implementing even one more tag in the fake bbcode parser thingy. The tests in fact would be nearly identical.

I'm pretty sure it's just a substitution at least for the b, i, u etc tags, because there was a bug where unclosed bbtags would make unclosed html tags.