Why do people post with whole paragraphs crossed out?

[PineappleSeahorse]

I keep seeing this and it's very annoying to read. Does anyone know what the purpose is? There must be some reason. I've seen people use it for one sentence when they put their real thoughts but paragraph after paragraph? There's obviously a reason but I don't know what it is.

If you write your normal sentence but do two dashes -- before and after what you want to say, it will automatically strike through.

Also if you do * asterisks it will bold** the bits between them.

Often the strike through /bold errors are because they have overused these 'punctuation' marks and not noticed that they change automatically

If you write your normal sentence but do two dashes -- before and after what you want to say, it will automatically strike through.
If you don't leave a space between the dash and the letters then yes, that is how it is supposed to go.

I used to type two dashes instead of one always, but they were not right up against any letters. There was a space between dash and letter.

i.e. dashdash, space, and, space, dashdash.

and

On the PC they looked like a long dash with the word perfectly normal in between. On certain phones everything I had typed between the dashes looked stricken out.

Hello OP.

We're guessing people have various reasons for using strikethrough - and in many cases they do it accidentally as referenced up thread. In many cases we reckon it's used to demonstrate the 'inside voice' of a poster, though obviously we can't speak for everyone.

Hope that helps and of course you can always just ask a poster why they've done it.

@YetAnotherBeckyMumsnet - the appearance can vary between browser and app. And in the app it seems like it should be WYSIWYG but it isn't always. So you can think your post is as you wish but then it appears messed up.

It's buggy, needs cross platform testing.