I spent years of my life writing text like this, and the first large programming project I ever worked on was building my own PHP forum software for fun. It never went anywhere, of course, but I learned a ton.
Forums are starting to make a bit of a comeback. Google did an algo update a while ago and a lot of forums picked up some traffic. Reddit got a big bump as well.
For some reason, this is the default for text UI elements in Godot[0]. Not Markdown or even HTML and CSS but this ancient markup format that died with forums ages ago. It probably doesn't matter for 99.9% of use cases, and most games probably just use sprites for UI anyway, but it does make more complex uses like parsing the HTML from HN's API a pain in the ass.
Been using this for decades. One forum I frequent has just upgraded. I think it uses xenforo, but things like [quote] have worked fine.
Some things (quite, spoiler, but strike through too for example) have always been tricky to find in the gui editor, much easier to type
square brackets
I spent years of my life writing text like this, and the first large programming project I ever worked on was building my own PHP forum software for fun. It never went anywhere, of course, but I learned a ton.