The epitome of web publishing technology shall for a long time remain some piece of shit written in PHP, so we might as well live with it.

... the smaller problem being that, while the world keeps moving, I'm stuck maintaining some legacy code written by some morons and hacked by some good folks from my larping days who meanwhile are off the grid. The more pressing issue being that while the world does the same, this bespoke Wordpress pulls along with it a whole Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP environment. I sure as fuck ain't going to maintain a whole LAMP distribution while my hardware specs change underneath the whole thing; and on the other hand I'm not going to go through the pains of porting MP-WP on latest PHP or whatever.

So yes, perhaps at some point I'll have to move back to text files generated from a MySQL database; and hopefully I won't have to reverse-engineer the comments mechanism, because frankly speaking, I no longer have the time nor the patience for that kind of shit.

Or maybe I'll just keep the whole thing to myself, since by now there's really no particular need to keep this log public.

The whole framework has served me more than adequately since I installed it; and it's certainly capable of way more, both horizontally, in the weight it can take, comments, articles and so on; and vertically, in the features it provides. In fact, if there's a problem with it, it's that it provides too much, and whoever thought that uploading "media", configuring the blog or hell, posting stuff -- whoever thought that any of these things should be done through a web interface is seriously fucked in the head.

In short: using Haskell code lifted off the Internet was a bad idea and writing a Lisp blog was misguided; meanwhile, reverting to Wordpress isn't that far off, but what can I do. The epitome of web publishing technology shall for a long time remain some piece of shit written in PHP, so we might as well live with it.

The fact that this isn't reproducible on other MP-WP installs adds to the weird and I'm going to have to investigate.

So, to explain the scenario in more detail: I'm inputting "ampersand-lt-semicolon b ampersand-gt-semicolon this is a quoted bold text ampersand-lt-semicolon slash b ampersand-gt-semicolon", saving, previewing, which gives same as your description, i.e. "left quote b right quote this is a quoted bold text left quote slash b right quote".

However, upon saving, the text in the box is also converted to "left quote b right quote this is a quoted bold text left quote slash b right quote", so if I save and preview again, this is going to yield "this is a quoted bold text" in bold.

There's a small chance I fucked up some code while playing with the importer I wrote. At least this part is easy to figure out (diff against a clean MP-WP press), I'll look into it one of these days.

It shows what you expect, i.e. the tags and the text, right? Now save and preview it again. What do you see now? No, I don't want to hear that "that's what it's supposed to do".

I just tried this on trilema, it shows left quote b right quote this is a quoted bold text left quote slash b right quote each time. Was the behaviour you observed different then ?

But mazel tov in any case.

With bold. And emphasis. Should these work?