Peter and I have been talking about implementing WYSIWYG editing for Wordpress comments for a while now. WP’s comments system is reasonably robust, but the HTML instructions seem to confuse some people:

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href=”" title=”"> <abbr title=”"> <acronym title=”"> <b> <blockquote cite=”"> <cite> <code> <del datetime=”"> <em> <i> <q cite=”"> <strike> <strong>

We quite often receive comments to out sites in which people - probably those unfamiliar with HTML - have taken these instructions to heart and created comments which look a little like this:

You can check it out <a href=”http://example.com” title=”here”>, more updates should be coming soon.

This can cause issues for the site as a whole: Wordpress doesn’t detect this error and close that anchor tag, so the rest of the comment becomes a link, which encompasses everything down the page until the next link in the code is closed. The same kind of thing happens when people put unclosed <strong> tags in their comments. We don’t have any closing </strong> tags in the page source after the comments, so when someone does this the rest of the site becomes emboldened until an administrator corrects the comment.

These kind of errors notwithstanding, WYSIWYG is perfect for comments. I don’t like WYSIWYG editors making decisions for me in my day-to-day coding life, as they rarely output exactly what I want them to, but writing comments is such a constrained activity; with a small number of tags available, the editor can’t really stuff things up too badly.

I’ve previously hacked a cut-down version of TinyMCE into our test bbPress installation. This was relatively simple, so I’d expected that it wouldn’t be hard to get it happening on the Wordpress comments form as well. I did a quick search first, though, to make sure I wouldn’t be duplicating someone else’s efforts. It turns out I would be, as there’s a Wordpress plugin called TinyMCEComments.

bbPress is a very stripped down forum system, by default it contains very few of the “accepted” forum functions, such as private messaging, user timezones, even image posting. These functions are all available via a simple plugin system modeled on WordPress, and the ring that binds these plugins is Plugin Browser for bbPress, which hooks into the bbPress plugin repository and installs plugins directly to your server.

This will probably become less useful over time as the plugin load expands, but right now it’s an excellent way to test things out and get some more functionality to our forum quickly.

We’ve been planning to move to bbPress for quite a while. phpBB is plagued with spam, both through spam user signups and to a lesser extent spam postings. Last time I checked there was no serious anti-spam plugins or modifications available, and the couple of hacky attempts to fix the problem were painful to implement and not particularly effecive.

So we’re now seriously on the path to a bbPress migration, there are some scripts around which will convert a phpBB database to bbPress, but our phpBB currently has 7486 registered users, and I’d say about 300 of those are real people. So before the migration, it’s time to remove the spam profiles.

Here’s a great start, it deletes all “members” who signed up over 48 hours ago and are inactive (haven’t clicked the confirmation link in their signup email).

The SQL looks like this: