Back in the day, HTML tags that were not closed in your post would continue down the thread.
Thus, If I opened an italic tag but did not close it in my post, ALL SUBSEQUENT POSTS would be in italic.
It was up to somebody downthread to close it.
Scrolling marquee was the most irritating of them all. It scrolled a message right to left.
This was around 1999 or 2000, IIRC.
Oh, man, I remember that ...
Being new to FR, I was so afraid to even make a response to a post, for fear that I'd forget to close my tags ...