It's an issue with the integrated ReCaptcha. I'm having the same problem

Markdown (and BBcode for that matter) treat certain characters as special, such as square brackets and parenthesis, where they are used for adding ilnks in Markdown (ex: [link](http://www.example.com) ) or for a tag in BBcode (ex: [url=http://www.example.com]link[/url] ) In order to use those special characters as they appear, (using them literally), you need to precede them by another special character, usually a backslash (\), and that process is called escaping.

Note that this problem applies to any markup syntax, including BBCode, Markdown, and HTML, so unless FN went with a WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) editor, you'd be required to escape your literals.

I actually use Markdown for story writing, but something like this would definitely help for those who use things like Word.

Counterintuitive:
This I can understand for short writing, but especially as writing gets longer, you tend to use less of these, like highlighting emotes like asterisks for stuff like emotes, and using bbcode makes it even harder to do proper formatting. I'm not familiar with using dashes for dialogs. Escape your literals, kids.

Very limited:
I agree with this for the general markdown syntax, but markdown is SUPPOSED to fully support html tags, which resolve many of these problems.

Unreliable:
Escape your literals, kids. It's just a simple backslash. \

No tags:
Yes there are, you have your [link](url) *italic* **bold** __underline__ . The only things that don't have conventional "escapes" per se are lists and quotes, but those are escaped by a double line break.

Unnecessary escaping:
This shouldn't be necessary. Dialogue in general typically uses quotes for beginning and ending dialogue, so I don't see how that's an issue. Using dashes just makes sense for lists.

New lines/organization:
Double enter does a paragraph break. If you need more, use <br>

Minority:
Numbers, please? BBcode is probably only popular because it's much older, but markdown adoption has been really fast.

Exsiting work:
Html, SHOULDN'T be an issue. As for bbcode, converting shouldn't be hard to html.

All in all, I think the real probelm is not having proper html support which is in the Markdown spec.

I agree with allowing html, but I don't think having BBCode would be a good idea, especially because the html spec already allows everything you can do with it, and is also in the Markdown spec.

As for allowing markdown to be optional, I don't think that's really necessary once you have html. Conflict with syntax isn't an option, because all you need to do is escape your literals.

Disclaimer: I write all my stories in markdown.

+1 to this, but I think, for sorting's sake, ID or Date should always be first.

Having the same issue on an android tablet (Firefox for Android, 1280x768).

WIll go to the bottom of a feed, but scrolling doesn't trigger, and clicking on the link doesn't trigger it either.

Not necessarily, I feel favorites are a way of saving the submissions that you like for later, while promotes are more of a way for you to show appreciation of the submission to the creator and others.

Looks like they fixed it. I need to log in in order to vote now.

In addition to that, using stories submissions as journals is against AUP.