Wedge

Unfortunately, yes, for now.

I do have some ideas on it, though - one of Karl's ideas was to be able to provide a 'scope' for the purposes of processing, and that could be used to indicate the type of parsing to do, which might be useful to implement sometime...

It sort of is, but it's also a drastic oversimplification.

Let me go back to YaBBSE / SMF 1.0 for a moment. parse_bbc was a very different beast then, and it was based on regular expressions, which under some conditions could be an order of magnitude faster than the current incarnation.

At the same time, it's also possible to brutally hurt the server with specifically crafted posts that force the regular expression to be parsed the slowest possible way, which under the right conditions would be easily an order of magnitude slower than the current parse_bbc processing.

That's why Unknown gutted it and rewrote it for 1.1. (Maybe it was for 1.0 replacing YaBBSE's. I can't remember, but certainly at some point prior to 1.1 final it was moved from regexp based to the current incarnation.)

parse_bbc now is slow. But you can't tie it in knots and generate pathological-case processing; it won't run into log time most of the time, and even with the worst case it won't typically be worse than linear time.

So, with that in mind, consider then that you can throw anything at parse_bbc and it should work as intended.

Doing something with it structurally is something I've been pondering for a while, and I keep coming back to this sticking point of its style of regurgitation - it doesn't ever take the content and filter crap out, it starts from sanitised content and specifically enables it. There's no good way I can see of approaching that without compromising security somewhere, and so it becomes a judgement call as to how far is 'far enough'.

Unfortunately what is 'conceptually simple' usually isn't in practicality.

IOW, parse_bbc can already do exactly what you want, out of the box, in SMF 2 and has done for a long time. What you're asking for isn't a change to parse_bbc, but a change of how the SSI functions work, which is a totally different concept.

I think you did, yes :P

I think a certain amount of it is what you get used to, but phpBB's interface never struck me as organised, but even as much as I think SMF's ACP is unwieldy and disorganised, it feels more logical to use than phpBB's does.

He's also one of the three LLC members. Thus his signature is needed, and there's been a hint that it also requires resignation from the LLC in the process...

Either way you still have the fundamentally same problem to solve ;)

It's something I've put a little thought into, but not a lot because it's really something that really wouldn't normally be needed to be changed.

phpBB is easy?! Both phpBB 2 and phpBB 3 confused the hell out of me.