New web newsreader - requesting participation

[foobar]

Adam Ruppe Wrote:

> foobar wrote:
> > 1. common human markup such as: _foo_ (underline), *foo* (bold) etc,
> 
> Yeah, that's a pretty good idea. I agree with the others that it
> should keep the text symbols (especially since I've seen these
> algorithms wrongly flag things *a lot*) but a basic implementation
> is ok.
> 
> > 2. parse BBCode.
> 
> This probably isn't a good idea... unless it is a web input only
> filter.
> 
> So posts pulled off the news server are treated as plain text - no
> BBCode parsing is attempted. But posts made through the website
> may be parsed, and converted to plain text before being forwarded
> to the news server. (Note that I use my beloved mutt mail client
> for reading the newsgroups myself, so anything that would break
> plain text email browsing is a no.)
> 
> I already have pretty decent bbcode -> html and html -> text
> functions in my bag of toys, so regular participants never need
> to know what kind of input was used.
> 
> It would let web users feel more at home without impacting
> everyone else.
> 
> 
> The only downside I see is if people think bbcode is accepted,
> someone might write it in their newsreader or email client, where
> it won't be parsed. I don't want the groups to get filled up
> with bizarre markup everywhere, but, the kind of users who use
> email clients and newsreaders probably won't make that mistake
> anyway.
> 
> 
> So yeah, let's give it a try for web posting and see if it works out.

Just to clarify, I don't want text posts to be filled with lot's of markup either.

BBcode was just an example of a light-weight markup which is familiar to web based forum users. other options could be markdown and restructured-text. Basically whatever is light weight enough to not bother text mode users and is also useful enough when parsed by your web reader to convert code into those awesome "compile & run" boxes.

We could also support just a tiny subset of BBCode (just the [code] tag), so that code snippets would be identified without a fuzzy guessing algorithm.