But I thought you should know that you can use the <xmp> and </xmp> tags to go into plain-text mode on the forum, which is really useful only when you want to type html tags without having them actually become html tags, eg: (the following text surrounded by xmp tags)
byond.com
You can also do this with the < and > tags, which should stay preserved in replies now. This is hardly worth mentioning but it required such a messy workaround in html ("platform independent my a*s") that I wanted to make it clear that it was done!