Strikeout font when I don't want it

[samarrange]

When I enclose text in a pair of dashes within a post, it gets formatted as strikeout. This is very annoying. It happens to other people, too. I regularly see posts with a long sequence of text struck through, which almost certainly wasn't the poster's intention.

Strikeout can be useful on occasion to convey irony, but IMO it isn't used that often that it justifies a shortcut, when the icon to format a selection of text as strikeout is there in the editor on every post, along with bold and italic.

So I hereby announce that when I persuade Elon Musk to buy Mumsnet and make me CEO, removing this auto-strikeout feature will be my first task on day one. Unless of course my perfectly reasonable request to remove it (i.e., this post) has been met by then. 😀

Why would you ever need to use a pair of dashes?

when I persuade Elon Musk to buy Mumsnet

You'll have to step over my corpse before that creepy weirdo gets his mitts on this place.

I use em-dashes quite a lot as an alternative to parentheses. And if a keyboard doesn't have em-dashes, I use three regular dashes. (Two regular dashes is an en-dash, but I only use those when I'm following a style guide.)

See https://www.thepunctuationguide.com/em-dash.html for a good summary of the difference between em-dashes and parentheses. 🙏

Oh sorry, I picked you up wrong and missed the word “enclose” in your first sentence. I thought you were using two consecutive dashes.

Like - - this.

Hi OP

We're looking into your feedback, and we do appreciate it. Whilst we have no plans to sell Mumsnet to Elon, we do wonder if he'll come in for a webchat...

Oh god, no @LilyMumsnet!

—testing—

Nope, still doesn’t work for me. Used to. Now doesn’t

Let's try a few:

Single hyphens - hello -
Double hyphens hello
Triple hyphens - hello -
En dashes – hello –
Em dashes — hello —
Minus signs − hello −

Ok, so it's double hyphens (the key to the right of 0, twice) that do it. If you type a triple hyphens, two of them become a double hyphen (strikeout) and the remaining single hyphen is shown as normal (give or take the strikeout).

—nope—

(double hyphens)

double hyphens up against the word: hello
double hyphens and then a space either side of the word: hello

—nope—

When I select that, the double hyphens seem to have been turned into em dashes. Are you sure that your computer/phone isn't autocorrecting them?

Ooh possibly

Euwwww. No thanks. I'd have to disinfect my laptop.

I mention it because I think Microsoft Word does something similar (if the options are set up right). I doubt if you're using Word to post here, but I can imagine it might be an autocorrect setting. I'd quite like to have it myself.