I regret not being able to figure out that answer, either.
I guess the general theory is
make the post look good automagically, when we can
Although there is some debate as to what “look good” means… I do think that curly quotes are more aesthetically pleasing from a typographic perspective, as a reader and writer. You’ll note that this very paragraph contains automatic curly quotes and an automatic ellipsis. 
I guess I just don’t care either way, neither of them looks prettier than the other to me; and I rarely even notice.
Other people, however, are not me. I’ve noticed that before. 
Well, I wish I could like that post. That was funny! I laughed!
Thanks! Not fully original, though – pretty sure I picked up ‘other people are not you/me’ somewhere on these boards, though I don’t remember who I first saw use it.
You got that backwards–two hyphens make an endash. And three hyphens make an emdash.
- hyphen -
- endash –
- emdash —
[I discovered just now that you can make an emdash. It’s great!]
Except when three hyphens on line by themselves… make a line by themselves.
(well, no, discobot, that was not a complete sentence.)
now that is odd. I put three hyphens in there with spaces between them. And they just all disappeared entirely. - - -
They show up if they’re on a line with something else, apparently; but not if they’re on a line by themselves.
Fortunately I can still make an emdash the old-fashioned way — shift-option dash
Hey, change of subject: where did the preview on mouse-hover feature go? On any list of thread titles I now (all of a sudden?) don’t get to see previews the way I used to.
If you’re on a device with a touch screen, mouseovers are disabled. Frustrating for all of us with touchscreen laptops who still have a mouse and would appreciate the hover (pretty please?).
It’s not that. I’m on an old-fashioned non-touchscreen laptop.
The emdash/endash thing is something I’ve noticed since I got here, so I don’t think it’s new. I’m used to typing two hyphens as a “poor man’s” emdash, and had to get used to using three here to get a proper emdash.
For some reason, the font used makes the endash a bit too long, so I didn’t notice I needed three hyphens to make an emdash until I used Linux, where I didn’t have that font installed. But now I try to do it right as much as possible—though I sometimes screw it up.
@codinghorror I wish I’d have realized an update was coming through, as I would have suggested a change to the parser for posts. It would be nice if the backslash escape character worked on thing added that aren’t part of Markdown, as a general way to prevent automatic formatting, eg. \https://www.google.com would make that not a link. Either that, or provide some tag that would do that, like the [noparse] tage that vBulletin uses.
(Yes, formatting something as code with ` does ignore formatting, but it still formats it as code (using monotype fonts) and disables wordwrap. Sometimes you don’t want to do that.)
BTW, I like that you changed Abandon to Discard—though, of course, I’m biased since I suggested it.
Well to do that use backtick e.g. https://www.google.com or a code block – more details and a tutorial at Markdown Reference
Oh, but reading further, you don’t want monospace fonts. Well, there are tricksier ways of doing things, like using bizarre unicode non-breaking spaces, and so forth.
A soft hyphen in front works. Alt+0173
https://commonmark.org/help
That works in some limited case. (Though I prefer using a ZeroWidthSpace, as it doesn’t ever accidentally show a hyphen when you don’t want it to.)
However, that only works for full URLs. Putting a non-printing character in front of, say, google.com doesn’t work, as you can see.
@codinghorror, These are just hacks, and involve finding unintended, unspecified behaviors that may only work in certain cases. It would be nice to have a proper [noparse] which worked for anything.
Using backslashes would be hard, since Markdown removes all of them. So I would like to suggest implementing the [noparse] extension to vBulletin. All it does is stop all parsing between [noparse] [/noparse] blocks.
I would guess that Discourse uses a standard Markdown module. So, in effect, you’re asking if Discourse can go off the Markdown standard. I don’t think that’s going to happen, just to meet the occasional needs of a single user.
Markdown already has perfectly good code blocks, including inline ones, as codinghorror said, except they are monospaced.
If I may ask, why do you want to prevent automatic links? And why are monospaced fonts an issue?
I concur. The requirements are… unusually specific.
It’s considered polite on this forum to “break” links that go to NSFW content (or even just content that you don’t want people to actually visit). The usual way is to insert some spaces, but that sucks since you might get a partial link, and then when you go to C&P it you have to manually remove the spaces. Simply disabling the auto-link prevents accidental clicking without the extra annoyance of spaces.
Using the spoiler tags is another method, but may still be a bit risky for very NSFW content.
If you (any you) have a link you want to break you but still be usable deliberately by your readers then you don’t want to insert anything invisible into it or appended to either end. Because with that trick they can’t C&P your link reliably without picking up the invisible thing you tucked in there. IMO the best answer for breaking links is:
DANGER Will Robinson DANGER! Simulated NSFW link inside.
Yes, you can’t make it inline that way, but something bad enough to warrant the 2-click rule probably shouldn’t be casually mentioned somewhere mid-sentence anyhow.
Really, this should just be a forum feature. Add a NSFW tag to the hyperlink, then have the software replace the original one with a page containing an “are you sure?” checkbox and button to continue or cancel.
I’m not a huge fan of the spoiler approach. Although it does minimally satisfy the two-click rule, it packs the clicks together too closely IMO. Two left-clicks right next to each other (spatially and temporally) is sufficient. A redirect page would require more deliberate action without making it too inconvenient for mobile, etc. users.