I've just received a mail from another person highlighting some of the broken comment handling facilities here.

Specifically the seperation between "plain text" vs. "html" when posting comments is a frequent problem, and it can be difficult to use special characters properly.

Mostly this wouldn't be an issue, except that we do have a lot of comments which wish to include things like Apache configuration blocks, eg:

<VirtualHost ...>
  Blah .. Blah
  Blah .. Blah 
  Megan ..
</VirtualHost>

The code behind the site (available here) makes a lot of modifications to submitted content to avoid XSS attacks, etc, and this has a lot of side-effects in the code which handles comments.

So I'm in a quandry.

The solution I'm strongly favouring is to drop Text vs. Plain in all areas of the site. Instead to switch to using BBCode for markup.

This will result in text like this:

[url=http://blah.com/]Link title[/url]

[b]Bold text[/b] [i]italic text[/i] .. normal text.

We lose the ability to do some things in the comments/markup, such as tables, but itemized lists (etc) will still be available.

Anybody comments? Opinions?

Yay/Nay?