> BBCode is definitely needed thank you Mahz. Using the asterisk as a bold or italic thing was kinda silly...  

Honestly, it's not. Think about email and text lists before rich text formatting became common. Asterisks and underlines were common ways of formatting text, in addition to ALL CAPS. Markdown follows that same idea, but as I mentioned before, it's more suitable for conversational posts like an email or discussion. It's not as good for novel-type posts, which is the primary content (debatable by our spammers, I suppose) here.