Broken formatting in migrated posts

I would wager there are thousands of topics with formatting broken after migration to Discourse. They are easy to find if you search for explicit strings containing the closing BBCode.

For example, you can click the magnifying glass at the top right and type any of the following (including quotation marks),

  • “[/UL]”

I appreciate your enthusiasm for descriptive titles :wink: , but it’s not just lists.

vBulletin used to render [DEL][/DEL] BBCode into <s></s> tags. Discourse breaks the formatting.

Examples (click to expand/retract)

vBulletin used to render [SUP][/SUP] BBCode as <sup></sup> tags. Likewise [SUB][/SUB] BBCodes used to be rendered as <sub></sub>. Those posts are now broken; good luck if you are interested in an old discussion involving physics, units of measurement with exponents, or even superscript footnotes.

Examples (click to expand/retract)

vBulletin used [SPOILER][/SPOILER] BBCode for what are now <details><summary></summary></details> tags. Discourse either ignores the old tags or renders them as blurs. Previously valid posting etiquette has now backfired spectacularly when spoilers are now ignored or rendered as giant chunks of blurry text. (some spoilers that used to shorten posts now just blur, some spoilers that used to hide text no longer do so)

Examples (click to expand/retract)

(I broke the NSFW links when I quoted GuanoLad ~Max)

As shown at the top of this post, it is easy to search for broken formatting. Try searching with these:

  • “[/DEL]”
  • “[/COLOR]”
  • “[/SPOILER]”
  • “[/SUP]”
  • “[/SUB]”

~Max