Why are line breaks and horizontal lines removed in the Laracast forums?

The standard CommonMark way to insert a hard line break is to end a line with two spaces, followed by a single line break. Thematic breaks (horizontal lines, <hr> elements) are inserted by having a paragraph (double line break before and after) containing only three or more hyphens (---), underscores (___) or asterisks (***).

Those both work using Laravel’s default implementation of CommonMark, and both are very useful things to be able to type in answers on Q&A sites.

But for some reason, neither works here on Laracast. The Markdown structure remains, but space space line break is just treated as a single space, and break break hyphen hyphen hypen break break is treated as a double line break (= single new paragraph).

So it would appear that these particular features have been deliberately disabled in the Markdown implementation here – but why? What’s so bad about hard line breaks and thematic breaks?

@jeffreyway @_adrian