What's your preferred way of marking up posts on whichever web boards you use?

There are a plethora of different approaches, using anything from plain HTML to age old BBS-style *emphasis* marks.

It's about time there was a standard for the basics of markup that are needed in the day-to-day interchange of messages via web boards.

All too often users attempt to employ the markup specific to one type of forum software that they're familiar with on some other forum - and the results can be awful, confusing and tiresome.

This is particularly apparent where folks are trying to share code snippets with each other - who knows if the author will even notice whether the critical double escaping of a \\b in a JavaScript regex has come through properly or not...?