Markdown Cheatsheet

Markdown syntax can enable you to be more expressive with your text posts on this website, with the ability to write **bold** text, add hyperlinks or embed images onto your profile page, Direct Messages, forum posts and elsewhere - any place on nonshy that says "Markdown formatting supported."

This is a simple reference sheet for Markdown syntax. Markdown was pioneered by John Gruber and the de facto place to find in-depth documentation is at https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax where it was originally described.

Markdown is now a widely supported format across a variety of apps and websites, and there are a few different "flavors" of Markdown with slightly varied behaviors. This website uses GitHub Flavored Markdown, an extension of Markdown that supports fenced code blocks, tables, and other useful features - many of which you can learn about on this page.

New (July 22, 2025): We now also support BBCode in addition to Markdown, so you can write colorful messages!

Forward: BBCode and HTML

New! July 22, 2025

We now also support BBCode, the simple markup language popularized by the old school phpBB forum, which can be used in addition to Markdown. The most notable feature that this provides is to set colors for your text, which standard Markdown doesn't have support for.

The supported BBCode tags are:

The [size] tag is not currently supported. For larger text, try the Markdown headers syntax.

If you know HTML, some literal HTML tags may also be used as well.

Block Elements

Paragraphs and Line Breaks

A paragraph is defined as a group of lines of text separated from other groups by at least one blank line. A hard return inside a paragraph doesn't get rendered in the output.

Headers

There are two methods to declare a header in Markdown: "underline" it by writing === or --- on the line directly below the heading (for <h1> and <h2>, respectively), or by prefixing the heading with # symbols. Usually the latter option is the easiest, and you can get more levels of headers this way.

Blockquotes

Prefix a line of text with > to "quote" it -- like in "e-mail syntax."

You may have multiple layers of quotes by using multiple > symbols.

Lists

Code Blocks

The typical Markdown way to write a code block is to indent each line of a paragraph with at least 4 spaces or 1 tab character.


GitHub-style "fenced code blocks" are also supported. Copy the following example into the above Markdown editor to see how it looks!

```
This is a GitHub-style "fenced code block", denoted by having three
backticks/grave symbols above and below the code.
```

Horizontal Rules

Span Elements

Links

The basic syntax for a hyperlink looks like [Text](https://example.com). You can also write your links "footnote style", where the link text goes like [Text][1] and then you provide the URL at the bottom of your post. See the examples below:

Emphasis

Code

Images

Miscellaneous

Automatic Links

Some naked links are automatically clickable, but to be sure you can wrap them in <angle brackets>:

Backslash Escapes

Use backslash characters to escape any other special characters in the Markdown syntax. For example, \* to insert a literal asterisk so that it doesn't get mistaken for e.g. emphasized text, a list item, etc.

Markdown provides backslash escapes for the following characters:

\   backslash
`   backtick
*   asterisk
_   underscore
{}  curly braces
[]  square brackets
()  parenthesis
#   hash mark
+   plus sign
-   minus sign (hyphen)
.   dot
!   exclamation mark

Literal HTML Tags

All Markdown syntax has a corresponding primitive HTML tag, and you may prefer to just write the HTML directly. This is supported too!

Note: non-trivial tags will be automatically blocked and hidden from the Markdown output. You can't use CSS classes or styles, <script> tags, or other dangerous HTML.

[[title]]

Loading likes...

Found [[ total ]] like[[ total === 1 ? '' : 's' ]] (page [[ page ]] of [[ pages ]]).

[[ row.username ]]
Loading...