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If you highlight some text, you can just press a button to have it automatically emphasized on indented 4 spaces for a code sample. I think it would be great if we had this feature with strike-throughs so I don't have to manually type s tags. People use strikethoughs to delete text from their posts when editing it and adding information. This is nicer than just deleting it because it gets the point across that its older information but you can still see the original text.

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32

There's no way that strikethrough is used enough to justify a button, and I certainly don't want to encourage its use any more than it already is..

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    Why don't you want to encourage its use? – endolith Nov 7 '09 at 21:55
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    Okay, now I agree with this 100%. It definitely isn't used that much, plus it makes more sense to just delete the strikethroughed text most of the time. (if not, it takes 15 seconds to do it manually...) – Gordon Gustafson Mar 9 '10 at 20:50
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    Actually I use it a lot. When I ask question I do a multi-teared question in where the answer isn't always done with one post. For that reason, I use the strikethrough because it will make people realize parts of the question is already answered. Like this question. stackoverflow.com/questions/12079285/… – Matt Ridge Aug 22 '12 at 19:48
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    Strikethrough can be legally useful, when somebody replied to your answer in comments and you fixed your code as a result. If you just fix it, people may start wondering why the comment is odd. This way you show what the original answer was and why the comment is valid. – user199936 Oct 26 '12 at 15:04
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    @CrazyJugglerDrummer No way! As user199936 correctly pointed out, there are far to many odd, useless, non-sense comments in entire SE, actually because people are deleting instead of striking through. So, I may agree with Jeff, that such button isn't welcome, but I certainly won't agree with you, that deleting is better than using strike-through. – trejder Dec 12 '13 at 12:34
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    @Jeff Atwood, there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamed of in your philosophy. There are a variety of valid uses for the strikethough styling, and you should remain agnostic, not partisan. You don't punish the valid uses because there is the possibility of abuse. Especially so on a site about learning English, where one can strikeout errors and show the corrected version side-by-side. But it's not a big deal, since we have the markup alternatives. – Tim Sep 14 '14 at 20:06
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    @trejder Delete those comments, then. Flag as obsolete. A clean, correct answer is more readable than a patchwork of wrong strike through text. And there should not be any need for readers to look at comments at all. – user259867 Sep 14 '14 at 21:47
  • Sometimes it can be very helpful to see the original mistakes made by the poster, and the way of how they eventually got to the answer. This can be more helpful than the actual answer. If you edit and correct everything, this is all gone (and you're not going to look at the history). – Ela782 May 20 '18 at 8:10
171

In the absence of a button (and given that Jeff has said it's not likely to be implemented) you can use the HTML tag:

Like this or this or this

Like <strike>this</strike> or <s>this</s> or <del>this</del>

See this answer for a complete list of the HTML that's allowed.

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    One of the key points in the suggestion was that the user didn't have to type one of these. Providing a button produces a lower barrier of entry for people and promotes the use of the feature -- like bold and italics. I don't know if strikethrough is the only HTML feature that should be promoted, nor do I have a strong opinion on if strikethrough should be promoted to a button. Just making an observation that your answer/point seems to go against the grain of the CrazyJugglerDrummer's desire. – ckittel Jul 26 '09 at 20:36
  • Ah sorry - I've updated my answer to reflect this – ChrisF♦ Jul 27 '09 at 8:53
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    I was looking around for this... – ATOzTOA Feb 26 '13 at 17:24
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    can you do this in comment – Muhammad Umer Jun 27 '15 at 17:19
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    It does <strike>not</strike> work in comments... <s>Even</s> with the alternate <del>tags</del>. – Juha Untinen Jun 17 '16 at 11:25
  • @Juha HTML S̶t̶r̶i̶k̶e̶t̶h̶r̶o̶u̶g̶h̶ in comments work for me!!! – John Militer May 30 '17 at 3:29
  • C̶h̶e̶a̶t̶e̶r̶.̶ – Scott Beeson Jun 2 '17 at 18:29
  • <strike>this</strike> or <s>this</s> or <del>this</del> Why doesn't it work for me in comments? @JuhaUntinen – Chris_Rands Jan 30 '18 at 9:36
  • @Chris_Rands where are you trying this. HTML doesn't work in comments – ChrisF♦ Jan 30 '18 at 9:37
  • @Chris_Rands - sorry, I gave you bum steer, The chat trick doesn't work in comments either. Not sure how to achieve that, though it can be done. – ChrisF♦ Jan 30 '18 at 9:39
  • @ChrisF meta.stackexchange.com/questions/135209/… – Chris_Rands Jan 30 '18 at 9:43
4

might be obvious to some but, a useful addition, you can wrap your code code strikethrough over your code... , but it won't show up if you include it inside the <s>code</s>

handy for code edits...

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    I've still yet to see a legitimate use of strike though. It almost universally leads to me reaching for the edit button – Richard Tingle Mar 14 '14 at 12:36
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    Actually, <code><s>code</s></code> will work in questions / answers, but you need to use HTML <code> tags instead of backticks (and escape any HTML / Markdown special characters in your code). Of course, it won't work in comments, since those don't support HTML tags at all. – Ilmari Karonen Mar 14 '14 at 13:28
  • didn't know <code>. cheers. – Amos Folarin Mar 14 '14 at 21:09
  • @Ilmari W̶o̶r̶k̶s̶̶ for me! – John Militer May 30 '17 at 3:30

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