What is the full description of the erroneous processing of plus signs in questions?
The Forum reported that eliminating following spaces would permit plus signs to appear. Another questioner has demonstrated that doesn't work, at least when the items separated by the plus sign are words.
So here are some further trials:
(1) 2 2 = 4 (two plus two equals four)
(2) following punctuation: 2 (a - b)
(3) mixing numbers and words: 1 two = 3
(4) Pythagorean triples: a² b² = c²
(5) some more punctuation: a {b [c (d e)]}
(6) some C language operators: i (that's the double plus) and a = b (the plus-followed-by-equal-sign combination)
If any of these show the plus signs, those will be usable cases.
I see they show up just fine until I actually submit the form.
Aha! They ALL disappeared!
Now I wonder whether
(a) the person who wrote on the Forum advising leaving out following white space was wrong, or
(b) Yahoo! staff decided that the problem was that there way any way to keep plus signs, and "fixed" the form so they are all deleted.
ironduke8159: I concur that nothing's been fixed, but I suspect that when the post in the Forum said that eliminating following whitespace would help, that was probably true.
Having worked and dealt with software maintenance organizations, I think it well within their typical behavior patterns that someone (either management, or a programmer in a hurry to close an issue) might decide to "fix" the problem by eliminating the one known method of getting a plus sign into a question.
As to the underlying reason behind the change in the first place, you've described it well. But the problem is not that they are applying new automatic editing to mathematics, but that they've applied it to everything without considering its effect on math questions.
I've seen a plus sign in a question, so I believe (and fervently hope!) this question has now become moot.