Overall I’m very positive about this change but “correcting” posts is a really terrible bit of behaviour. It doesn’t feel like something the mods would be able to change but if they can then they absolutely must.
To avoid misunderstandings, it is not that the software “corrects” any posts, just that you must keep in mind you are working in a markup language with a particular syntax, for example for bold and italic text, and not at all like using a typewriter.
In GQ there’s a thread, “Term conspiracy theorists use” which does have the orange pencil. The OP did indicate (with a manual “ETA:”) that the post had been edited–so, does that mean that sometimes the system does show an indication of a user-edit? If so, when does it do that, and when not, and why?
Alternatively, if that orange pencil is for a system-edit, why the heck would Discourse have edited that OP? The only such system-edits I’ve run across so far have been when you quote the entire post for the post right before yours, which presumably wouldn’t apply to an OP.
Hot tip for everyone here – if you’re curious about how @eschereal is doing that formatting, get the link to the post and replace the /t/topic-title-here/ in the URL with /raw/.
It does not change ellipsis-plus-period to just ellipsis. It’s not that smart. All it does is check for two or more dots and replace them by a single “ellipsis” glyph. In fact, if I manually insert an ellipsis … followed immediately by a dot, I get …. , which is an alternate solution to @needscoffee’s problem.
You can also see things like two or three hyphens turning into correspondingly long dashes— one thing which does feel like an attempt at correction is the collapsing of multiple commas into one.
To conclude, once you are aware of what it actually does, perhaps through trial and error since we do not know what custom modifications have been made to this site, you will be able to override it when necessary.
ETA: See the above non-sense? Disco-Nanny-Bot didn’t hassle me (this time) about making a post that doesn’t make sense, but it did exactly that a few days ago. That’s the kind of interventions that we probably don’t really appreciate around here.