EXreaction wrote:If all it returns is HTML is is useless as phpBB will not allow posting any raw HTML.
The return of such a service name (ie YouTube) can be used to determine the BBCode, to parse under as opposed to using HTML which obviously would never happen for millions of good reasons.
Using an API for this is a bad idea, adding a dependancy for vanilla phpBB is an even worse idea (if the site goes down or closes, this feature wont work, forum admins get angry, etc etc) , but a similar concept to that service performed locally as said would be cool, so rather than sending out a request to the webservice to find out which BBCode to use for a given embed link it passes it through a function which determines all of this locally. Aka hard build this concept into it.
In summary, this API is bad, but the concept is good. (my opinion)
I believe vBulletin has this locally too, not sure about the other forum software
EDIT
Pros:
- Doesnt need lots of BBCodes for multiple embed sites
- Has the possibility of supporting alot of things (admin submitted regex?)
- Easier to use (user end)
Cons:
- Only +0.1 (3.0 > 3.1) - Most of the boards already have existing [youtube].[youtubehd],[dailymotion],[etc etc] tags,
- No functional gain (all this can be done without it)
- May cause slowness (such features many board admins get carried away by bloating them)
