Is the spoiler markdown broken?

Question

See https://rpg.stackexchange.com/a/74047/23970: Korvin and I think we've got everything right, but the spoiler hide/reveal text feature isn't working.

Answer 1

Yes, they're broken. They've been broken in this particular way for a couple of years now. There's no neat workaround. One spoiler paragraph sitting in lonely isolation is always fine, but combining them isn't so easy.

What you did to break it (aka what to avoid)

Your problem was that you wrote out two adjacent paragraphs:

>! one paragraph

>! another paragraph

which looks like this:

! one paragraph

! another paragraph

That break between the paragraphs messes up spoiler quotes.

Fixing it

The way to patch it up & retain roughly the same intended appearance is to break up the paragraphs manually:

>! first paragraph can be left as-is
>! <p>other paragraphs need a `<p>` element at the start
>! <p>another paragraph
>!
>! <p>if you want to separate your paragraph lines in your editing, still use a `>!` on the empty lines like above.

which looks like this:

first paragraph can be left as-is

other paragraphs need a <p> element at the start

another paragraph

if you want to separate your paragraph lines in your editing, still use a >! on the empty lines like above.

or to divide the spoiler paragraphs completely:

>! one paragraph

<!-- -->

>! another paragraph

which gives you this:

one paragraph

another paragraph

The <!-- --> is an empty HTML comment. <!-- You leave comments in HTML like this. -->. The extra line breaks around the comment aren't important for the comment's sake. You can leave those literally anywhere and they're totally invisible, there's one in the middle of this sentence. You do at least need a line break above the comment to split the spoiler quotes. The line break after is optional but to me things look neater with it.