Summary

There is no way to escape a word-starting hash character (#) in plaintext.

Steps to reproduce

In MM 7.3.0, post this, verbatim: \#anything

Expected behavior

#anything

Observed behavior (that appears unintentional)

#anything

Possible fixes

Workaround: instead of ”\#anything”, post this: &#​35;anything

Using backticks (`\#anything`) also works, but obviously the word then gets formatted as code and not plaintext.

Other notes

This is mainly an issue of inconsistency and surprise: backslash works to escape most other special formatting, so I’d expect it to work here too.