Alright, looking at comment restructuring, bbcodes, ancient comment cleaning and new commenting interface/features this week.

In terms of data structure, I'm not changing a whole lot beyond what I discussed with indexes. I'm setting up a defined row number that will tell me which page the comments belong on regardless of page length, which I eventually make a user setting.

BBCodes, those things that let you muck about with the text, the current implementation is actually the only thing I kept from the original FSTDT code I was handed. It has a few... issues. So I've tracked down a configurable BBCode implementation that I can setup as needed. Which should let me keep all the current codes without any issue. I'll also be putting up an actual listing of how it works on the new site so people can have a real clue what's going on. With some luck it'll even let us link to anchors in URL brackets, but I haven't tested that yet.

Ancient comments, one of ye old issues. Well before I even came to this site a number of comments were ported either from static files or a completely different database structure. They use HTML Markup and otherwise ineffective encoding standards that I need to get cleaned up. Well, I have a test database I can fuck up at will right now so I'm taking a few shots at cleaning them. If anyone is interested in helping a few examples of things that annoy you should let me make sure I put something comprehensive together. If I screw up it's just two hours of downloading the comments again rather than screams and damnation as I cause comments to implode.

Lastly, and the part people are likely to actually care about, the new commenting features I want some feedback on what people would want. The absolute basic right now is changing out the comment creation procedure so that the panel used is created on command and does not cause a page submit(thus causing comment duplication when someone refreshes the page).

Since everything is being built from scratch I can add in some of the features that have been discussed in the past. Either adding in Quote tags with the BBCode setup, or giving the @CommentNumber notation actual link functionality. Quote tags are pretty standard on forums, but they don't have that traditional feeling @CommentNumber has picked up over the years. So, toss a vote in the comments for

or @CommentNumber and I'll see which I should focus on getting implemented.