[The Geek]

ugh. The reason I stopped supporting AME is because I stopped supporting vB. I never even had a vb4x site (though like many I parted cash in an unnamed "pre sale" almost a year ago). I am currently in the process of converting to another forum package (that oddly has auto embedding an an extensible video system) in my busy schedule.

As to the points about what AME does versus what vB4x does - well, thats by design. AME2x was far more complex and feature rich than AME3, but that was because I built AME3 on top of vB's video code system for maximum compatibility.

AME sholdn't hae even been needed in vB4 as the additional functionality of AME SHOULD have been out of the box in vB4. The vB video code is limited (but well written) however for whatever reason, it was done without the average user in mind.

Users are bathed in rich and responsive UI's every day now. Gone are the days where users were woooed over your smilies appearing in your wysiwyg editor. Users DO NOT understand or care about popups or tags (we fix about 30 broken quote boxes a day to prove it).

When we click on a smilie, we expect one to appear in our editor. When we do a colon and paren, we expect a smilie to appear in our message. When we paste in a URL into our message, we expect the url to be a link when we read the page. Me (and my users) expect to be able to post a link to a youtube video and it appears in their post.

These are not crazy concepts, they are natural user expectations.

All of the code is there, almost all the functionality is there - but there is a disconnect. Smart linking (of videos) is an important user experience feature that could have been great but instead a non extensible video tag that users have to be instructed about before using.

In regards to definitions - Anyone with minimal regex knowledge could whip out a crap load of definitions simply and easily (heck, 15 minutes looking at the ones there would have gotten people started).

I had also hoped that people would have "got stuck in" and involved in sharing definitions with each other (thats why I spent so long creating import and export systems). But in the end there was DJ and a handful of others trying to help everyone else that wouldn't even try to help themselves. Which is fine and to be expected to a degree - but also sort of sad and deflating.

Anyhoo - those are some of my thoughts on the subject(s). I do hope that AME's functionality gets folded into the core system one day - but sadly I won't be here to see it.

nJoy and thanks for the fish!