Comment Markup: BBCode or Markdown

[DVG]

Having previously started a forum project, this is something I never came to consensus with myself about.

BBCode is well adopted in the forum world and almost all forum-goers are familiar with it. However it has relatively poor support in the Ruby world for a drop-in parser, and will require significant work to build an implementation or extend an existing on beyond the standard tags. Ruby BBCode (ruby-bbcode) was my personal preference for a parser so far, however it's last update was more than 8 months ago.

Markdown is extremely well supported in the Ruby world, Redcarpet (https://github.com/vmg/redcarpet) in particular will add it easily to the application, but outside the technical world not a lot of people are familiar with it.

[skord]

Thinking to other forums, BBCode is the defacto standard, but if I think about sites like Reddit & Github, it's pretty much markdown the whole way, so I don't think users will be too confused. Some sort of minimal JS helpers for bold, italics, etc might ease the barrier, plus since we're using bootstrap, there's plenty of neato icons and buttons for this sort of thing.

I've used kramdown (http://kramdown.rubyforge.org/) in the past, and it's pretty darn fast and backwards compatible with markdown, that's my vote.

• mike

On Sep 21, 2012, at 2:28 PM, Bradley Temple notifications@github.com wrote:

Having previously started a forum project, this is something I never came to consensus with myself about.

BBCode is well adopted in the forum world and almost all forum-goers are familiar with it. However it has relatively poor support in the Ruby world for a drop-in parser, and will require significant work to build an implementation or extend an existing on beyond the standard tags. Ruby BBCode (ruby-bbcode) was my personal preference for a parser so far, however it's last update was more than 8 months ago.

Markdown is extremely well supported in the Ruby world, Redcarpet (https://github.com/vmg/redcarpet) in particular will add it easily to the application, but outside the technical world not a lot of people are familiar with it.

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[mdarby]

+1 Markdown

[vampirechicken]

On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 2:28 PM, Bradley Temple notifications@github.comwrote:

Having previously started a forum project, this is something I never came to consensus with myself about.

Abstract it, build the one you like. Somebody will build the others as long as the abstraction is in place. Then you get to let the user choose, at the cost of a markup_type column.

Len.

lenjaffe@lenjaffe.com 614-404-4214 Proprietor: http://www.theycomewithcheese.com/ - An Homage to Fromage Grubmaster: Greenbar http://www.greenbartraining.org/ 2011, 2010, 2009, Grub Asst. 2008, Trained 2007.

[adamalbrecht]

I prefer Markdown and don't think we need to cater to everyone's needs, but having said that @vampirechicken is probably right in that we could just abstract and (eventually) support both.