Been feeling this pain over the past few days as I’ve been reviewing a few customer engagement/support systems (UserVoice, Assistly, TenderApp). We currently use TenderApp and whilst it’s not as whizzy as the other two it uses MarkDown. This means replying to user question and creating knowledgebase articles is super-simple. UserVoice allows textile in its KBs but has no formatting support whatsoever in normal message replies. Assistly is very similar but uses a WYSIWYG editor in the KBs.

For me, MarkDown does everything I need and it would most definitely be my choice when writing blog posts, replying to support calls or writing KBs. If I want to get created I can just stick HTML in the post. Otherwise, the MarkDown syntax is much clearer to read and edit.