Have I missed a formatting meme?

[Garm Bel Iblis]

I was reading a blog on Tvsquad.com today and i also noticed it a few times on the boards, instead of bold, i'm just seeing the markers. is this a system issue or an internet joke that I'm missing?

example from tvsquad

If you have a question that you'd like answered, feel free to e-mail us at asktvsquad [at] gmail [dot] com.

 

[Lindley]

That's just a way to try and prevent webcrawling bots from picking up the email address for spam purposes.

 

[Misfit Toy]

That's just a way to try and prevent webcrawling bots from picking up the email address for spam purposes.

You mean [for] spam [purposes][period]

 

[Canadave]

That's just a way to try and prevent webcrawling bots from picking up the email address for spam purposes.

Yeah, I frequently do this if I'm posting my email address somewhere that can be Googled.

 

[Small White Car]

I remember this from 1998. You really haven't seen it before now??

To be fair, pretty much everyone did it then because spam-filters pretty much didn't exist (compared to what we have now, anyway). These days stuff like g-mail is so good at filtering stuff out that most people don't care as much so they stopped doing it.