You know, all I want to do, and all the majority of users want to do, is to post simple text messages. They don't need a full editor laiden with hundreds of KB of Javascript and now apparently ActiveX controls.

Each to his own, though.

I think a lot of people would disagree. :) If that is true, then we might as well go back to MS DOS 3.11 and use WordStart to write documents - why use WYSIWYG in MS Word? :)

As technology improves and broadband becomes norm, web applications will also become more complicated.

The Internet went from text using Lynx, to what we have today. It's the nature of progress.

I'm one of these - I don't use the WYSIWYG mode at all - but I know many do. :)

If it is the IE add-on, I have used it for over a year and it is Ok at best. I was under the impression that the new spellcheck was going to be integrated into vb.

Perhaps, but Word et all are used for making full-blown documents and amateur desktop publishing. A forum is generally used for conversations where formatting is not used nearly as often.

What about bbcode then? Over the years I've seen more and more complicated bbcode included in bbs software. Most of it is done with a html-like system of mark-up using tags for bold, underline etc.

A newbie is not used to the concept of bbcode, thus they go through a bit of a 'breaking in' peroid where they get used to bbcode.

Compare that to coding html for the web, most of the advanced guys hard-code everything and are used to looking at code. Most people that just want a webpage turn to a WYSIWYG program to build the html for them, the code doesn't matter to them, as long as the end result looks the way they want it to.

Thats what we are seeing with forums now and the WYSIWYG editor. A newbie can use the mouse to select a mark-up option until he finds the one he wants, he then gets to see the results in real time as he types the message. A novice is much more familar with this, then they are at learning mark-up and typing it within the message.

That may be true for a lot of forums, but not all of them. In my experience forums that have a more philosophical/educational/debate/science or other intellectual bent tend to utilize the formatting tools much more heavily than your average gaming/chat site. I personally think forums are a lot more aesthetically appealing when people have the tools to format their posts well and take the time to really use them.

Like I said, each to his own. However, vB has been getting a little too complex for my tastes. It tends to make assumptions that a user already knows how to use forum software. Hell, vB2 used "User CP" everywhere and it took me forever to learn that CP actually meant "Control Panel."

The one thing I can't stand about vB (which encompasses the majority of my problems with it) is that it does not strictly follow the model-view-controller paradigm. It's getting closer, but the model, view, and controller (database, web pages, and controlling PHP) are so integrated with each other that completely changing vB's appearance globally is virtually impossible without modifying every single template and quite a bit of PHP.