[CdM, Raak et al] I agree... The number of times I've read stuff that's been published thinking "How on earth did this get through?" means that, having been hit with something like that there is only one response. I would say more, but I fear any attempt at anonymity would go through the window.

I would be interested in the opinions of fellow posters - I have thought about this from time to time but I don't think that I have actually posted my opinion.  Why, when our User Names are posted in bold type do we insist on then using HTML tags to match the entry?  To me it really does make the entries rather hard to read.  This does not apply only to this site.  Why do we do this to ourselves?

[Dujon] I'm not quite sure that I understand your question - no, actually I am quite sure that I do no understand! What do you mean by "match"?

If you mean "Putting game moves in bold" then the answer is "to make an actual move stand out from any by play and commentary". That's about the only interpretation I can place on your query, but I'm still confused to be honest.

[Dujon] Are you by chance referring to games like Advice, 10,000 Celerity CDs, the various poetry ones, etc. where practically the entire game is written in bold, as opposed to the MC games where having the moves picked out in bold is useful? Would you prefer to see more games take the style of, say, Auckland and 50 Ways, to take two recent examples?

[Dujon] I, too, am slightly unsure precisely what you are asking, but a bit of historical input might be called for. In the early days, there was basically no markup, but this caused a problem as if you simply made the comment "and I reckon we can reach Mornington Crescent in three from here" the game would end. So to prevent this problem, it was decided that the moves should be marked up so the server could work out the actual move made amongst the other text. This has the side-effect that moves are also more obvious to the observer. In non-MC games, early posters seem to set the convention for that game. There seems a general trend towards those games where commentry is inappropriate to be played unemphatically (e.g. Auckland). All this is self-organising however. As to displaying the player name in bold, well, I think it just looks better, and allows you to see more clearly where moves start and end - this is most useful in these chat games. I have a vague recollection that York (at least in its early days) didn't mark up the player name.

I know of someone who apparently used to just take about half the CVs received for consideration and chuck them in the bin, saying "I really don't want to give this job to an unlucky person". Harsh, but amusing.

(cross posted from MCiOS, after spotting that you wanted us to reply here) [Dujon] There is quite often a legit reason for doing this. Sometimes you want to separate your move from your commentary about your move (as in MC games themselves), so you'd tend only to embolden your actual chosen move, and then refer to other stations which are relevant in italics. If you look at the York archives, you'll see this is a practice that grew up over time. The same thing happened with limericks, to enable the submitted line to be distinct from comments (and heaven knows that's always helpful with some of the scansion round 'ere). It's become useful in other context to the extent that it's now hard-wired in the system to a certain extent, with Dan's advice-o-matic looking for material only that's marked up with b tags. So there's a sort of logic at work there. I suppose we could use i tags instead, but I tend to find italic text just that little bit more fiddly to read on screen.