Here’s another idea on how to deal with this problem.

A common format for forums and lists

In terms of technical merits, that would be miles ahead of NNTP… not to mention it’s actually likely to happen.

Couple of minor wrinkles:

I happen to post a lot on one forum, BloggingHeads.tv. Before they switched from Phorum to vBulletin, the number of posts was prominently displayed next to one’s uname. Now, it still is, but it’s much less obtrusive.

As it happened, other people used to accuse me of posting just to boost my count, an observation which could not have been more wrong. It got to the point where I wished the post count would go away, just so my number didn’t set other people off. I even considered starting to post with a new uname, just to stop the noise. but I finally decided that since I didn’t care about my number, I shouldn’t care what other people said about it.

Second, regarding BBcode or the like in place of HTML: I disagree with you; I can see the thinking behind it. As annoying as it is to us non-malevolent commenters, it does seem a pretty good way to cut down on security holes and automated comment-spamming tools, while still preserving the desired functionality of markup and linking. Given the state of the Web, I’m happy enough to deal with it, since I do want to be able to, say, italicize, quote, and point to other URLS. I agree with you that it would be nice if there were a more uniform syntax across platforms, but usually the more common elements are the same.

The points where you most resonated with me were the irritations over how crummy forum search tools invariably are and how annoying it is that one can’t automatically retrieve one’s own content. A clenched fist salute is all I can add here.

All they’re doing is making the markup non-standard which is, at best, security-through-obscurity.

I don’t get a lot of spam on this blog due to the obscure blogging platform I’ve chosen. However, I can tell you that of the spam that does make it through the Akismet filter — which is the only anti-spam filter I use, BTW — prettymuch all of it is infested with forum-esque markup such as [URL=blah]..[/URL] and not regular HTML.

I’m not saying that the forums should support the full set of HTML tags. I am saying that for each of the markup functions they choose to support, they should pick the HTML syntax over anything else. It’s simple, it’s common, it’s well-defined, it’s widely-supported.

As for the rest, well, I don’t know much about vBulletin et al. I haven’t used an NNTP client for years. Funny, isn’t it? It used to be all the rage back in 1992.

Now that I think about it, you might be right about the HTML vs. BBedit-style tagging. Seems to me I long ago read an explanation of why my claim was true, but I’ll be hanged if I can remember it now. (Uh-oh … senior moment?)