Why are old posts surfacing?

General
1

In case anyone was curious about old Roll20 posts surfacing, there’s a really simple reason!

  1. When I initially imported those posts from Roll20 to Discourse, I used an HTML to Markdown converter, which (for example) turns italicized text into _text with underlines_.
  2. The problem is the conversion isn’t perfect, so for example if you italicize the whole line and the invisible newline character, it puts the underscore where italicization ended, namely on the next line - but that’s not valid Markdown!
  3. As a result, you might occasionally see posts with stray underscores in the text. That’s where they came from.
  4. I’m reading old posts as background research for Phase 2/Phase 3 stuff.
  5. In the process I’ve been cleaning up invalid Markdown like that.
  6. Discourse interprets edits to the last post in a topic as new activity, and surfaces that on the Latest posts view.

Simple as that.

3 Likes
2

I figured that was the reason. Still, it’s often fun to see those posts resurface (“I REMEMBER THAT!”). And, yes, I’ve noticed the Markdown errors previously, and appreciate your tidying.