Hello,
I'm here to touch on the touchy subject of BBCode that has been discussed many times before, yet the importance of it seems to be dismissed.
BBCode is STILL the main way of styling forum posts in many communities. In a community I moderate, many users either post broken topics (styled with BBCode that works on (all) other forum software) or complain that the BBCode that does work gets converted to HTML when they save their post.
To claim that BBCode is deprecated and an old technology is fine, but forums are right up the same alley. People who still use forums, are people who also still use BBCode. BBCode is simple, it's like writing Markdown and everyone loves that. Suddenly taking that away from everyone, in the spirit of being innovative because everyone else "still" uses BBCode is a bad move. BBCode still exists because it works great. It can't be that hard to maintain from a technical perspective. I believe your decision to drop it was more of a "crap we fudged ourselves and now it's hard" rather than a "this is what the users want" decision.
In previous discussions it was mentioned that it's technically challenging to bring back proper BBCode (into the current CKEditor?/parser). Back then a user proposed a separate editor for those who wish to write in BBCode (AND KEEP IT IN BBCode). This could be a solution to the technical dept you've created by removing it, should you wish to avoid fixing it. Otherwise, I think "a lot of work" is just the way it is. I don't think anybody requested the removal of BBCode, and I believe the demand for it is large, but not very apparent towards you guys.
Now,
If there is a way to:
Add BBCode extensions (through plugins or a UI)
Permanently stay in BBCode source mode (and also persist the posts in the original source format, be it HTML or BBCode)
Support all the previously supported BBCode elements in the same format as other forum software
then please point me to that solution, and forget this post, but the last time I checked there was no proper solution. I know there is a BBCode plugin for CKEditor but that doesn't really do much besides convert (some) BBCode into HTML when writing the initial post, but this is not what is required. To my community (and probably many others), BBCode is MUCH more important than HTML. Not a single user of my community writes HTML posts and many don't want to take the time to use the WYSIWYG editor to mark up their post. Many of the users post BBCode posts from other forums as well and these often don't get marked up at all.
Anyway, thank you for considering my post and I'm sorry if it sounds rude but I'd like to stress the importance of BBCode.