In the ca. 20 years, I’ve been wasting in internet forums and chats, I’ve gotten used to text written in asterisks describing an action in third person. *points at this example*
However, in this forum, it is also the action shortcut to turn text cursive. points at this different example
From what I see, the forum does recognise the <b> and <i> commands for bold and cursive text, so those could still be used in this position. I don’t know, how much of this forum is under admin control and how much is coming from a third party, so I can’t tell, if this could be changed by Kafka. Also not sure, if anyone is typing out the text commands instead of using the buttons on top and would be affected in a negative way by this change.
But if I was able to write something as simple as, let’s say, *g*, without having to switch to the odd preformat font (if there is any different noparse command available here, I have not found it) or having it end up as g, it would seem like a tiny improvement to me.
I know, this is as an irrelevant detail to type about, as it gets. Didn’t mean to waste forum space for it, but could not reach Kafka through PM about it.
I’ve been using forums for over 30 years, since the old days of Usenet and Fidonet Dial-up Bulletin Board Services and asterisks were always used for * emphasis *
(I have to put in spaces because, without them, this forum software turns that into italics which, really should be /italics/ )
When Internet Relay Chat became a thing, actions were described as:
Rockwell: I remember reading about the emphasis version several times, but never experienced it myself. I thought, it maybe fell out of fashion after the 90s and was replaced with /this/ or _this_ variant.
And the mentioned examples of *lol*, *g* and all their variations do hint towards a description of actions.
Also the /me command does of course only work at the beginning of a statement and looks very odd, when interjected into text.
Putting text in /text/ indicated italics, text indicated underscore.
Asterisks around * text * indicated bold.
It depended on what form you wanted your emphasis to take.
Personally I still use asterisks, because it’s a lot quicker to type than adding BBCode or selecting text and then clicking on the Bold button or other forms of markup.
