It’s taken a lot of careful consideration and feedback over the years to reverse course on this, but I now fully believe that the benefits of escaping HTML outweigh the drawbacks. The goal with this change isn’t to enable huge blocks of code but rather add flexibility for developers when discussing bits of code.

For the time being, we still recommend using Gist or Snipt if you need to discuss large blocks of code, but the ability to discuss some basic markup without leaving Sifter should help make communication a bit easier.

One other benefit is that replying to and creating issues via email should be much more reliable. Previously, email signatures had a tendency to include bits of markup that would trigger our markup filtering and reject some emails. With the new policy of accepting and escaping HTML, it should be much more forgiving. However, you may have a lot of additional email signature cruft.

This change won’t be live right away, but it will happen in the very near future. I wanted to go ahead and start giving everyone a heads up about the change. This change will also be retroactive for all issues and comments. If you have any questions or concerns, just drop us a line.

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