@kaa I think someone forgot to tell the Markdown parser that ;-)

Seriously, though, Manton fixed the issue with underscores in usernames that triggered broken italics when using underscores for italics elsewhere in a reply (and using asterisks would have only helped when using italics and @-mentioning people with single-underscore usernames, and we have a few with at least two underscores) that prompted the suggestion to use asterisks in that case…

This, incidentally, illustrates a reason why I dislike Markdown; its edge cases fall too near the center, and the lack-of-markup makes too many things a black box. It’s great if all you are doing is italicising and bolding and linking a word or two in something that is otherwise 100% plain text, but it starts falling apart rapidly thereafter ;-)