We appreciate the feedback! I certainly understand there are still some niche sites - notably certain techy/dev sites that still rely on to BBCode both because they find it easier and it’s what they know. The (comparatively) few still using it are very passionate about using it and we can definitely appreciate that.
At the same time, the BB in BBCode stands for Bulletin Board. It was created long before WYSIWYGs in the 90’s by UBB. The web has since long evolved and with the advance of proper WYSIWYG technology, so BBCode is really rare to encounter. Be it Google Docs, email or virtually any modern editor, we all use buttons or shortcut keys like command-B as second nature, which works even with markdown.
The real issue is the fact that it’s simply not native to any modern editor (that I am aware of) - including the one we integrate with, CKEditor. We have a backend “parser” that converts your BBC tags to HTML upon submission, but there is no way to convert that back for editing or any other purpose. To maintain overall stability as well as compatibility with editor updates, our only intention with Invision Community 4 was to ensure some degree of backwards compatibility for those who still use tags when submitting content. The software in fact does that and while BBCode will be deprecated (which simply means it will not be further developed) in a future release, we have no immediate plans to remove it entirely.
While there are still traditional software packages that have legacy BBCode support, you will find that most modern community platforms have no native (built-in) support for BBCode and I think it’s extremely unlikely we will ever see it make a comeback (although I said the same thing about bellbottoms.)
We are always open to ways to improve your experience with the editor and if you’re struggling to get things formatted properly using native functionality, we would welcome you to open a support ticket so we can see what you’re trying to achieve and try to offer some help.
Thanks again for taking the time to share your concerns!
