Markup language limiting

Question

Hope this is the proper place to comment on the way that the Discussions software works...it appears to be.
I'm continually frustrated by the overly simplistic markup language on these Forums. Using characters such as the plus, asterisk, brackets, etc, for marking up causes numerous headaches when these characters are desired in the post. Most notably, Apple's own log files get significantly butchered when simply copying into a post. The most common element in the logs is a process name or unique # inside brackets. This gets marked up unintentionally to a hyperlink.
Additionally, quoting a long section of text requires the tedious process of inserting "> " before each line, rather than something at the beginning and end.
A much more user-friendly method, IMHO, is employed on forums using vBulletin, for example. On those bulletin boards, marking up is done much less ambiguously, yet far more intuitively. If I want something in bold, I wrap the intended item in "{B}" and "{/B}". Of course, those aren't actually curly brackets, they're straight...but I can't use that character here or I'll get a hyperlink!
Is there some reason this limiting method has continued to be used here? I never have any gripes when using markup on a vBulletin forum, but continually grumble and have to "reformat" my text here. :-\
Thanks,
Fred

Answer 1

Fred Turner wrote:
If I want something in bold, I wrap the intended item in "{B}" and "{/B}". Of course, those aren't actually curly brackets, they're straight...but I can't use that character here or I'll get a hyperlink!
Fred ~ Nesting such special characters in the tag will prevent their interpretation as special characters:
Place your special characters here
...so your straight brackets will appear as:
"" and ""{code}
Fred Turner wrote:
Additionally, quoting a long section of text requires the tedious process of inserting "> " before each line...
The following long section of text was quoted by inserting a single "> " in front of it:
"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum."
But quoting long sections of text in-line can make the thread difficult to read. An alternative is to link to your text posted elsewhere, e.g. at free posterous.com. Here's an example of a crash report posted there by converting the report to a PDF and attaching that to an email sent to Posterous: