I’ve experienced a similar issue over on the WaniKani forums, which run on Discourse. However, I can’t reproduce the issue here on the Meta forum.
Since the WK forums are all about learning Japanese, it’s not uncommon to make bulleted lists of Japanese words. This involves writing out a word phonetically and then selecting a word from a drop-down list, often using the Enter key.
For example, to get the character 火 (pronounced hi), I might type:
h i SPACE ENTER
Unfortunately, when I do this in a bulleted list, whenever I hit ENTER, Discourse adds an additional asterisk and space after the word. This becomes particularly frustrating when trying to write out a longer phrase, which often involves hitting ENTER more than once.
Desired output:
* 気を配る
Actual output:
* 気* を* 配る*
As in your case, this never happens for the first item in a list. Even if a list contains multiple items, nothing happens when updating the first item.
- 気をつけて
- 気* を* つけて*
- 火*
The issue does not occur when selecting from the dropdown menu using some other method, such as by clicking or hitting the right arrow key; only when hitting ENTER.
Tested on:
| Browser / OS | Windows 10 | macOS |
|---|---|---|
| Firefox |  |
|
| Chrome |  |
|
| Safari | (not tested) | |
| Edge | |
(not tested) |
= bugged
= no bug
I’m not sure why this happens on the WK forum but not on this one. Has it been fixed in a recent release, perhaps?