Read the update: 5 November 2019
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Topic on Talk:Talk pages project/Updates
In phase 1 of the community consultation (on the English Wikipedia) I discussed at length about how replying would actually work in terms of wikitext syntax, and more or less came to the conclusion that comments would ideally be multi-line by default to prevent unexpected issues; the marker for the start of the comment (if any) would then be followed by a line break in most or all cases. A lot of wikitext things, notably tables, lists and paragraphs, depend on being preceded by one or more line breaks. Of course, any number of other syntactical solutions could be developed, but not messing with e.g. what characters wikitext tables can be allowed to be preceded by would probably be less disruptive than changing that.