We are now (as of 28 Jan 2020) removing leading (and trailing) '#' characters from answer summaries.

As Paul [says](/meta?q=370#a362), "Basic markdown in answer snippets is useful"

The biggest eyesore is the '#' heading markers, which are very common in the first line of an answer, and don't add any value to the answer summary. As of now we are stripping those out (but leaving the rest in).

We thought about removing '>' characters, but that can make the answer summary look misleading. We think answers that start with quoting the question, and answers with reference-style links, both need to be tweaked with an edit to improve the answer summaries.

You may also be interested to know we are now also cheat-rendering reference links:

@@@ answer 715

*Basic* [markdown](https://markdown-it.github.io/) in **answer snippets** is useful.

It would be nice if markdown that isn't supported in snippets were suppressed.

## For exhibit **A**

My proposal is that the post snippet for this post would show up as:

> Answer: For exhibit A

Currently a mix and match edition with some markup stripped, others not is presented:

![2019-12-06_17-08.png](/image?hash=194801b9a63b2c82620e6c71e7c72d767c5c70b0d299dd421e9a0aa52165f01b)

One or two cases is not a big deal, but it quickly becomes noise:

![2019-12-06_17-09.png](/image?hash=27d6ceddcaf4098a9ec39637cbc51bbe49fde5303e49a76b6860b21f1829b7d2)

Might this be done in a way that doesn't remove the `#` character from code? It's a common character for some languages in Code Golf (i.e., input for Mathematica), and such answers may be quoted fully in the snippet where the silent deletion would be confusing.

(Edit: Actually, it looks like the code doesn't appear in the summary when  a header comes first, so this is moot. Though maybe ideally the code would appear if it's short.)