Its absolutely a great idea and I'm surpised forums are still using this code/button click then, its an outdated way if you think about it. Why use code tags like like italics [i] or bold [b], when you could simply do it the way every text editor program does it by hitting a button. Your not scripting anything or writing in a authoring language, its just a simple document and should be easier on the person using it. I admit, using the tags at some points is very fast, but you could also make a WYSIWYG editor like this and implement it to use code tags also.
I just spent about 45 minutes tickering with the code and trying to hardcode it alittle into my forums, but about as far as I got was putting it in my main forum directory

. I'm just not that great of a coder to tackle a big project like this yet, but I hope somebody does. It would be a shame if VB3 came out and still used the old way of doing things..tsk tsk, so primitive