Formatting with Markdown

Markdown is a simple way to add formatting — bold, italic, links, lists, headings — to your text just by typing a few extra characters. Fun Swap renders it everywhere you can write more than a short sentence.

Where you can use Markdown on Fun Swap

  • Your profile bio
  • A group description when you create or edit a group
  • A swap description when you create or edit a swap
  • Comments on profiles, swaps, and groups
  • Direct messages and group broadcasts

The cheat sheet

Bold and italic

**bold text** — bold text

*italic text* — italic text

Links

[Fun Swap](/content/site-root.html) — Fun Swap

Images

Embed an image by URL. The syntax is just like a link, but with a leading exclamation mark — the text in brackets is the alt text (a short description for screen readers and for when the image fails to load):

A few rules:

  • Only http:// and https:// URLs are accepted; data URLs and local file paths are rejected.
  • Images display at the width of the surrounding column and scale down on small screens.
  • Privacy note: when someone views your post, their browser fetches the image directly from whatever site hosts it. That host sees their IP address. If that matters to you, upload the image to your gallery instead and reference it from there — the image is then served from Fun Swap.

Sizing and framing an image

You can add a small attribute block in curly braces right after the image to control how it's displayed:

{width=300}
{width=300 height=200}
{.framed align=center}

Supported attributes:

  • width=N — pixels (e.g. width=300) or a percentage of the column (width=50%).
  • height=N — pixels. Usually omitted so the image keeps its aspect ratio.
  • align=left, align=right, align=center — float the image left/right so text wraps around it, or center it on its own row.
  • .framed — adds a subtle border and drop-shadow around the image.

Lists

A bullet list (start each line with -):

- first item
- second item
- third item

A numbered list (start each line with 1., 2., …):

1. first
2. second
3. third

Headings

Start a line with # for a top-level heading, ## for a sub-heading, ### for a sub-sub-heading, and so on up to six levels.

Quotes

Start a line with > to make it a blockquote:

Like this one.

Inline code

Wrap code in single backticks: like this becomes like this.

Code blocks

Fence multiline code between two rows of three backticks. Each set of backticks must be on its own line — triple-backticks inline with text on the same line become regular inline code, not a block.

```
let greeting = "hello";
console.log(greeting);
```

Add a language name right after the opening fence (no space) to get syntax highlighting. Supports the common ones — js, ts, html, css, json, bash, py, sql, and several dozen more.

```html
<h1>Hello, world!</h1>
<p>An HTML example.</p>
```

Likes and sort on swap and group discussions

Comments on swap and group pages have a 👍 button next to each post. Click to like, click again to unlike. The count appears in parentheses once at least one person likes the comment. You can't like your own comment.

Above each discussion, a small Sort control lets you reorder the list by:

  • Newest (default) — most recent comments first.
  • Oldest — earliest comments first; useful for reading a thread top-down.
  • Likes — most-liked comments first; ties break by oldest, so popular long-running threads bubble up.

What's NOT supported

Tables, raw HTML, and YouTube/Twitter/etc. embeds are intentionally left out — both for safety and to keep rendering fast across every place on the site.