The reason for doing so, besides Andy's point (which is already handled by the code parser so that only permitted HTML may be used), is that more of the people posting messages on the web are familiar with bbcode than HTML--even though it's essentially identical for the most common elements. I have no intention to turn the forum into phpBB, but there is merit in using a message markup scheme that is known by more users.

My main question is whether or not to eventually prohibit HTML in messages and force all markup to be done with bbcode. The only two reasons to do that would be: 1) It simplifies the code parser since it simply strips all HTML entirely and processes bbcode. Otherwise the parser has to be able to parse both HTML and bbcode. 2) If someone posts with HTML tags and then someone using bbcode replies to it, the HTML tags in the original message will be presented as HTML in any text the replier quotes. So then we have a mix of bbcode and HTML tags.

A third option is to convert all appropriate HTML tags to bbcode at the moment a message is saved.

I still haven't decided what to do and right now bbcode and HTML are both implemented simultaneously. Obviously I need to fix the bbcode parsing as per the original observation in this thread.

Regards,
Craig Steiner