Designing a comment system using ASP.NET/C#

Question

I'm coding a comment system for an ASP.NET application written in C#. Ideally, I want something similar to what we have on Stack Overflow. Is there an existing library that would allow me to parse specific part of HTML/BBCode (to support only Basic HTML)? Or is it simply better to write one from scratch, including the Javascript, etc.. ?

The Ajax Toolkit "Editor" control doesn't look all that safe and doesn't seem to exclude the HTML code that could be written but for which you didn't add any button.

Answer 1

StackOverflow uses a custom implementation of the Markdown format. It's very lightweight, which means it uses a simple syntax but is quite powerful, whilst not being WYSIWIG. You would probably be best off going with something like Markdown.NET or possibly just using the WMD (Wysiwym Markdown Editor).

Answer 2

The comment system on SO consists of a hand rolled Markdown Editor (Can get one here), numerous JQuery extensions (Another with JQuery) and main library and a number of AJAX/JSON calls done through JQuery.

Answer 3

Thanks for the tip.