Users may not be aware that the Discourse post editor is not a crude and simple text editor, although it may appear so. In fact it supports markup for formatting in the form of Markdown, BBCode, and HTML.
Here’s the Markdown syntax that is supported:
In fact, when you type a post, the text and markup formatting is shown in the right hand panel, so you can see this is not just Notepad.
Although BBCode is supported, it’s not so common now and I recommend Markdown.
Markdown does tables very nicely - handy for all those stringing lists people post.