Switching to REST
I noticed nutella mumbling about the ability to check the output of his entries. I only just realized that he was actually entering everything in HTML, and ignoring the actual plain-text formatting that motd uses. Even his entries that were just blank unadorned paragraphs were separated with <p> tags instead of blank lines.
Well I've now switched laziness away from the old "genericwiki" formatter, and over to reST. This means that shoving HTML code inline will no longer work, and you'll have to learn reST layout in order to punch in unicode entities or make non-trivial links. The end result, however, will be to banish those hideous less-than/greater-than symbols from everyone's posts.
But the bonus is that you can always test by running rest2html on an entry and checking your result in a browser.