There are improvements to help your friendly moderators here keep spam off Maker Forums, and the bug that caused us to disable tooltip “hover” display of post contents from lists of topics has been fixed and the Discourse Tooltips plugin re-enabled.
Also, at some point in the reasonably near future, we expect to be able to enable the new rich text composer. To the best of my knowledge, those of us who like writing markdown will still be able to use markdown, but those who are annoyed by it will no longer need to learn how to use it. I expect this to be a signature feature of the next major release of Discourse and to be at least a few months away from being ready; it still has substantial limitations.