Remember the magic bullet string? Someone put together a long string of off-codes in HTML, and when stuff was left on, one could put that string in a post and regain control...usually with the word "fixed?" as the text.
LOL! I remember that trying to get bold or something else to stop. Those were the days on here! I was so glad when Jim went to have so many posts per page. I remember refreshing those long posts and they took forever.
I had a huge list of about a hundred close tags that I would just throw up if all else failed.