Remove formatting in Skype messages

Our development team uses Skype for messaging, voice conference, and screen sharing. It has proven itself a reliable tool year in and year out. Unfortunately, for a software development team it is sometimes unhelpful, especially when it mistakenly interprets data or code as emoji or formatting instructions. I assume that Skype developers use Skype for their communication too and so will have the same frustrations with it interpreting message text as our team has.

Skype's Preferences dialog does allow disabling emoji but not formatting (at least on the Mac). To remove Skype formatting in messages were, for example tilde means strike-through and asterisks means bold do the following

  1. Quite Skype, 
  2. Edit the file $HOME/Library/Application Support/Skype/shared.xml, 
  3. Replace <EnableWiki>1</EnableWiki> with <EnableWiki>0</EnableWiki>,
  4. Save the file, and
  5. Restart Skype.

Update: Blogger's editor seems to have similar issues!