About the BBCode Editor
BBCode grew out of the bulletin board scripts of the late nineties, where letting members write raw HTML was a security problem. Square bracket tags gave moderators a small, safe vocabulary instead, and phpBB, vBulletin, XenForo and dozens of game and hobby boards still speak it. The awkward part has always been that you cannot see the result until the post is submitted, so a mistyped closing tag becomes a wall of bold text in front of everybody.
This editor closes that loop. Type on the left, and the pane on the right shows the rendered post with quotes, lists, code blocks, colours, sizes and images in place. The status line counts your words and tags and warns when a tag was opened and never closed, which is the single most common reason a post looks wrong. Smilies typed as :), ;) or <3 become the matching emoji when that option is on, matching what most boards do server side.
Switch the Show dropdown to Generated HTML when you want the markup rather than the picture, for instance to paste into a static page or a bug report. Nesting is repaired as it is parsed, so an unclosed [b] stops at the end of the post instead of leaking. When you already have finished markup and only need the conversion, BBCode to HTML is the shorter route, and HTML to BBCode handles the return trip from a web page.
How to use
- Type or paste your post in the left pane. Press Sample for a draft that exercises most tags.
- Watch the right pane update, and check the status line for an unclosed warning before you post.
- Flip Show to Generated HTML if you want the markup rather than the rendered result.
- Press Copy to take the output, or Download to save it as a file.
Common questions
- Which BBCode tags does the editor understand?
- Bold, italic, underline, strike, sub, sup, url, email, img, quote, code, noparse, list with numbered variants, color, size, font, alignment, spoiler, table and hr.
- Why does my post look right here but wrong on the forum?
- Boards customise their tag sets. Check whether yours supports the tag at all, and whether it renders line breaks the same way, since that setting differs between phpBB and XenForo.
- Can I turn the smiley conversion off?
- Yes. Untick the emoji option and text such as :) is left exactly as typed, which matters when you are posting code that contains those characters.
- Is my draft sent anywhere?
- No. The parser and the preview both run in the page you are looking at, so an unpublished draft never leaves the machine.