Spectrum has been designed to be the all-in-one communications platform for all of the Star Citizen Universe and I think it's time that we begin to see some improvements in the user formatting options. Right now, the formatting options are very basic and annoying to use. You have all of the standard formatting options, no more exciting than bold and underline. These options cannot be activated using any kind of keyboard bind and must be activated through mouse-clicks. Allowing people to activate formatting options using a mouse-click is good to have and helps people get started with basic formatting, it is nowhere near what a major communications platform needs in order to be usable by thousands of users. I suggest, and it has been suggested in the past, that Spectrum adopts the reddit markdown formatting options. This formatting scheme has been tested, improved, and used for nearly a decade. It's so popular and usable that Discord adopted the formatting scheme for their own platform. Common formatting options across huge and widely used platforms improves user adoption and usability. It also allows users to respond in plain text, and not be forced into a WUSIWYG editor, while giving users a distinct picture of what the end result will be. Example: # Header 1 ## Header 2 ### Header 3 Translates to headers of diminishing size (and possibly varying styles) but because the user is placing a number of "#" symbols, the user instantly knows which level of header he is at and the header itself takes up no more space. A WUSIWYG editor would need to take up a great deal more space to show the header size and any additional spacing before/after the header (per formatting styles). Markdown also implements lists intuitively. A user can start an unordered list by simply prefacing each item with a symbol (varying symbols can be used in some markdown schemes), for example an "*" key. * item 1 * item 2 Users can also intuitively begin an ordered list prefacing each item with a number. 1. item 1 2. item 2 Code blocks and URLs can quickly be added to a users text FLUIDLY and without interruption or the necessity to hit a "URL" button and paste a URL in a new dialog box. [Link Text](https://URL.com) There are numerous more formatting options which can be used easily and learning them is simple and intuitive. https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/6ewgt/reddit_markdown_primer_or_how_do_you_do_all_that/c03nik6/ Currently, the formatting options for Spectrum are basic, annoying to use, and a jarring experience. Please consider updating the formatting options, and quickly!