POP Forums v8... it does exist!
I struggled in my mind for a long time about how I would build out the application. On one hand, I could be clever, OOP it to death, and wind up with something that beginners could never alter in a way to suit their own needs. That would be great for me, but not so good for the target audience. The PHP guys have been kicking our asses for years because their forums are fairly easy to hack and slash. That's what I want. The happy medium I've come up with is to build a nice rich class library, but avoid hard-coding UI into it. That means templated controls and UI glue code right in the pages, where the beginners and in-between folks are used to seeing it (and where it's perfectly acceptable in a VS/VWD 2005 world).
Another thing I've charged myself with is really stepping away from the UI that has been around since UBB and think about how it could be better. POP Forums was the first forum to use a crude rich text editor (that's the honest truth... I searched everywhere for one that did it back in the ASP.old days). Now I want it all to make more sense in the context of human conversations. I don't even know what that means, but I'll let you know if I have any ideas.
The project is not without its scary stuff. There was no way I was going to totally start over from scratch, so the class library did start from v7.x. Back in those days (October, 2003), I didn't even know what NUnit was, so there were no unit tests. I have written some tests, but they're crude, and mostly done to address changed stuff. I could write more tests to cover more code, but that's a huge undertaking with thousands of lines of code, and of course writing the tests after the fact taints the tests with code monkey bias.
I don't know if the text parsing engine is 100%, but that was something I rewrote out of unit tests. That has been the bane of my existence since I first tried writing a forum back in 1999. One drastic improvement is that I also hacked apart my less than stellar rich text control and almost started over. The new one is much cleaner, works in Firefox, and is far less bulky than FreeTextBox. It does all of the basic formatting, sans fonts and colors, because as a site owner, frankly I don't want people messing up the color scheme I work so hard to make not suck. ;)
I wish I knew when it would be done, but it's too hard to say given the day job contract I'm working right now (not to mention coaching high school volleyball). I hit a nice stride tonight, and met a few milestones I was anxious to get to.