Discord Markdown Preview

In short Discord uses Markdown closely enough to lull you into assuming it is Markdown, and the places it differs are the ones you notice only after posting. Bold is two asterisks, as in Markdown. But two underscores are underline in Discord and bold in standard Markdown, which is the difference that trips up anyone moving text between the two. Spoilers use double pipes, small text uses a hyphen and hash prefix, and neither exists in Markdown at all. Headings stop at three levels — one to three hashes — where Markdown allows six, so a fourth-level heading renders as literal hashes. Tables are not supported in any form, which is the omission people hit hardest when pasting documentation into a channel. Code blocks work as expected with triple backticks and support syntax highlighting by language name. The practical approach is to write for Discord rather than converting from Markdown, and to preview anything long, because a message that renders wrongly cannot be quietly fixed once it has been read.