using markdown in a forum?

[Allan Odgaard]

On 1 May 2010, at 11:45, Louis-David Mitterrand wrote:


> Is markdown a good language to use in a web forum application? How  

> does it compare to bbcode in features and ease-of-use for non- 

> technical users?


One advantage of BBCode is that it has nothing to do with HTML. It is  
its own language and fully defined.

If you allow Markdown you need to consider whether or not you want to  
filter out HTML tags (you probably do want to filter them out due to  
security). If you do filter them out, you force users e.g. to use  
Markdown links which for non-technical users might be done best using  
some widget (but the same is true of BBCode).

Also because Markdown is somewhat implicit (rather than explicit  
markup) it might be possible for users to trigger unwanted  
conversions, see GFM for 3 changes they made to avoid this: http://github.github.com/github-flavored-markdown/

That said, I very much dislike writing text using BBCode.