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Just thought I’d let everyone know that the SE-network rolling migration to CommonMark has landed at RPG. You can see that link for more details, but for the most part you should expect no real changes—and only when writing/editing things from this point forward, everything from before now should fall in one of three categories:

  1. It worked as it was and nothing changed or needed changing.

  2. The source needed slight tweaking to achieve the results they previously had, and these changes were automatically applied.

  3. The source needed more significant tweaking that could not be automatically applied, and so the question or answer will have its source left alone but continue to display a cached version of the result, so it still looks the same as before. Anyone editing it will need to adjust things, however, as the old source code won’t produce the result it used to (and by editing you are removing the cached version by definition).

Case 3 scenarios are supposed to be rare; most everything should fall under 1 and 2. Nothing should fall outside these cases, which means nothing should have its outward appearance changed in the slightest. (Report any changes in the actual appearance of things as a bug.)

As such, there is no need to edit anything in response to this update. Every question and answer should look exactly as it did before, so no edit is necessary. The only exceptions would be if there was an outright bug that messed something up, so every edit in response to this should be accompanied by a bug report. Please do not spam the front page with unnecessary edits like removing no-longer-necessary comments.

The automatic changes in case 2 were a one-time thing, so going forward, you may need to adjust your editing somewhat. There aren’t a lot of changes, though.

Some of the biggest things that did change:

Headers without spaces

There is a slight change in how headers work:

###Header

###Header

This no longer works: there now must be a space between the hashtags/pound signs and the text of the header, like this:

### Header

Header

(This is the one I noticed that prompted this discussion; I don’t really like it but oh well. I’ll adjust.)

Multiple box quotes

How multiple quoted lines in a box quote is handled changed a bit:

> one

> another

one

another

The blank line between them now makes these two lines two separate quote boxes. Useful for when you want multiple quote boxes (since before you had to abuse an HTML comment, <!---->, to achieve this), but most of the time you’re probably going to want one box. To achieve that, you need a > on the blank line too:

> one
>
> another

one

another

Continuing bullet points in lists

Indentation requirements on extending bullet points in lists have gotten stricter, where before they were lenient but rather quirky.

* these

 lines
  • these

lines

This used to work, where the single-space indent on lines would have it included in the same bullet point (but separate paragraph) as * these. The actual number of spaces you needed and when the next level in was triggered were rather quirky. Now, you have to actually match your indentation on further lines to where the text started for the original bullet.

* these

  lines
  • these

    lines

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    \$\begingroup\$ If anyone would like to check those posts of theirs which have been edited as part of this, you can find them on your user page: Activity > Responses > Revisions. Depending on how you do your formatting you might have many pages of "Edited by Community". \$\endgroup\$
    – Someone_Evil Mod
    Jun 16, 2020 at 18:18
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    \$\begingroup\$ @Someone_Evil Whoa. I have 48+ pages of revisions. Napkin math suggests that it’s 967 revisions. I guess that’s what I get for not adhering to the header rules. \$\endgroup\$
    – KRyan
    Jun 16, 2020 at 18:59
  • \$\begingroup\$ @Someone_Evil does that mean that I need to check all of my old stuff to see if the commonmark migration didn't something bad? \$\endgroup\$ Jun 16, 2020 at 19:33
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    \$\begingroup\$ @KorvinStarmast No, if the migration changed anything you shouldn't notice it until you edit that post (at which point you may see some other things that what you meant to change also change). Check the preview a bit extra when editing old posts. \$\endgroup\$
    – Someone_Evil Mod
    Jun 16, 2020 at 19:37
  • \$\begingroup\$ @Someone_Evil Thanks. I did find an old table that I had in a code block so now it is in mathjax \$\endgroup\$ Jun 16, 2020 at 19:49
  • \$\begingroup\$ @Someone_Evil yikes, I have some nasty old formatting mistakes, I'll only check on a few every now and again to avoid flooding front page. But I did finally comply with V2's ask on moving an analysis to a different question. \$\endgroup\$ Jun 16, 2020 at 20:26
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    \$\begingroup\$ Perhaps worth noting, tag wiki's aren't getting automatically edited (at least as of now), so when editing a tag wiki which has markdown stuff (I don't think we too much of it), check that it'll still work correctly. \$\endgroup\$
    – Someone_Evil Mod
    Jun 16, 2020 at 21:58
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    \$\begingroup\$ @Someone_Evil Continuing off of that, the shift does not affect tag wikis, user profiles, chat, nor comments. The change only affects posts (i.e. questions and answers) \$\endgroup\$ Jun 16, 2020 at 22:02

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Good news, but please edit your old questions as we normally do.

I'm seeing a lot of edits come through that should probably be spaced out over time so that the active page isn't flooded.

Before you start editing, please review both how many have been done and how many you plan to do.

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    \$\begingroup\$ It's also worth noting that for the third category of posts mentioned in the question, there's no urgent need to edit those posts - as far as I know, they will continue to appear as they always did, and will only be re-rendered when they are edited. \$\endgroup\$
    – V2Blast
    Jun 17, 2020 at 7:26

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