To avoid spam against a targeted person I think.
The forum software thinks it's smarter than the users in all sorts of ways. It has built into it a particular model of what conversations should look like, and tries to do automated moderation based on that model.
Just hit the escape key when it nags you.
It's true that nobody cared what degrees you had. But I think if, say, you showed up in a jacket and tie you'd probably have to clear a higher bar to be declared a winner.
The big problem is that it was extra hard to break out of the loser category. (I remember "luser" as being applied more as a generic term than when discussing a specific person, but I'm getting old, so who knows.)
Couldn't resist ... 
It seems to be a quite common way of thinking, right now.
I guess. But, there are two cases. (1) The user has a disability that makes boldface not work for strongness. In that case, you can just change the definition of <b> to do something else. (2) Boldface does work, but you want to use blinking for strongness and use boldface for some other purpose. In that case, you shouldn't; people approach your document with a shared understanding of what boldface means and what italics means, and if you adopt some screwy other convention, people will have a hard time reading your paper.
(By the way, in the case of italics I have to learn at least three different tags to get italics the way they want me to: <em> for emphasis, <cite> for book titles, and I don't know what I'm supposed to say for foreign phrases such as ipso facto.)
PS Four cases; sometimes you want to start the chapter with a whole paragraph in italics, or have a paragraph or several in italics because someone other than the main narrator is telling a story.
Thank you bh for this book, very interesting
I did say it's ironic that I find myself moderating the forum...
By the way: It would be wonderful if they lived by that principle.
The original theory of the web was that servers provide content and clients provide formatting. The server sends data, with a minimum of formatting, and it's the user agent that formats, knowing the user's preferences about everything.
But then the big rich corporations came along, and they wanted to control what their pages look like (not least so they can include advertising), and people invented CSS, and servers send out pages full of formatting (half of which I can't read because they change the font color without also changing the background color), and all that's left of the original division of work in which the server sends data and the client formats it is this one relic and fetish about <i> and <b>.
A third case: (3) a font color change is preferred for emphasis at a website but for color blind readers they still want to fall back on italics or bold. The emphasize command can be customised appropriately but it would be wrong to change italics to blue for non-color-blink readers.
I found it particularly bizarre that it suggests that instead of several replies you should combine them all into a single reply using multiple quotes and @ mentions.
nope, not in the new version of the website
Oh yeah, I forgot. You made it so you can't call the api with the url block.
Wait, could web services block do that?
Nice, thanks for the link. Of course it doesn't really solve the problem until my bank, my doctor, etc., all use it!
probably not, but even if it could as opposed to the url block, it requires JS.
The snap 6 version still works, it just requires javascript though.
Yes, but your IP gets banned.
Could we please not turn this into a forum about how to break the rules of the site?