Hi,
I’m wondering why markdown in topic titles isn’t rendered. The topic of this thread is probably illustration enough, but just in case, here’s one from our internal instance:
Ann
AI-generated summary
A discussion is underway about why markdown is not rendered in topic titles. ganncamp initiated the conversation, wondering why this feature is not supported. eviltrout expressed concerns about potential abuse, such as using bold or underlined text to make titles appear more important, but noted that emoji support is available and generally not problematic. Falco mentioned a recent addition to control excessive emoji use in titles. Some users, including ganncamp and sam, suggested implementing markdown support, possibly as an opt-in feature or theme component, particularly for programmer-heavy forums. However, Johani noted that parsing markdown is not the primary issue, but rather the potential for noisy and distracting titles, and the need for consistent styling across various platform features.
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I’m not sure there’s an official reason we never added support, but I know personally I am wary of people trying to make their topics look more important by adding bold, underlines and such.
Having said that we do support emoji which can be overdone too, and it’s generally not a problem.
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We recently added max emojis in title to help control that.
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Could I at least have code? 
… yeah emojis can be overdone. 
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It would have to be an opt in thing, I can see people trolling with this extra power.
I am not strongly against it for programmer heavy forums, also mathjax blocks are needed for math heavy forums.
There is very little precedent out there though, Stack Overflow which is super programmer centric does not do this. I would recommend starting out with a theme component here.
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Has anyone created a theme component which parses markdown in titles? I searched but could not find anything so far.
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I’m not aware of any theme components that do this at this point. The problem isn’t so much about parsing the markdown; that’s not that difficult.
The problem is that it can get noisy and distracting very quickly. You’ll also have to parse the title in all the different places where it’s used. Otherwise, it looks good on the topic list, and you get this in notifications
You’ll also need to spend some time on the styles.
Like Sam mentioned, this is doable in a theme component. It will probably be an 8-10 hour job if you want to create a topic for that in the Marketplace category and see if you get any offers from our community developers.
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