Tips Sheets: An Editing Syntax Sheet - Is there one?

[Kita Pepita]

Hi there,

I enjoy writing up Tip sheets for the games I like. But I struggle to figure out what markup rules are being used. I frequently reference the Wikipedia edit tips, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Wikitext#Format. But whatever wiki product BGA is using doesn't seem to follow these rules. For example, if I use section headings, then bulleted lists do not display the bullets when I view the display from the game page. Is there somewhere I can go to get the markup rules? Does anyone know?

Also, when I edit a Tip sheet it may take hours or even a day to become available within the game page. Why is this? Are there moderators checking the content? Is it a simple sync delay? I'm curious. Part of the reason for my curiosity is that pages frequently display differently within game page (as opposed to within the BGA wiki page). So, checking your work becomes a multi-day extravaganza.

Another thing I just discovered is that there is a limit of one image on a tip page. That seems right to me; a good decision. But it would be nice to know about rules like this. Is there someplace that this stuff is written up?

Any clues would be most welcome if people know about them. I know this stuff is obscure. But it's part of my gamely nerdiness. Which apparently it needs to be expressed in Tip sheets

[RicardoRix]

Short answer - there isn't one.
You can try this, but I doubt it will get you very far:
https://boardgamearena.com/forum/viewto ... =9&t=13321

I can't help too much, but I'll try. I only know things, almost the same as you from experience. I wrote an extensive 'game help' for commander chess.

One thing I noticed is that, yes there is a difference in formatting depending on where it is displayed. You mentioned the bullet lists, and there is something about images too. I have a table of images which don't get displayed but then other images are... I don't know why. But they are all displayed inside the wiki preview.

So I just made the decision to make it work inside the wiki preview, which always seems to work and gets updated instantly. The wiki help page you quoted/linked is the one I used. You may then need to wait a day before you can see it in the game page (for whatever reason, I don't know why there is a time delay (multiple servers or something?), but I think it's just a time-sync thing).

I don't think there is a 1 image limit. I could be wrong but that sounds a bit arbitrary.

One avenue that I think I started to look into but then stopped myself is this:
You can look at the html source of each page to try and compare if the mark-up is then translated differently into html...
It's likely that it should be the same, and if so then it will be the css style sheets which are different and so that's why the bullet points disappear.
But if you do all this, then it's a lot of detective work just to tell you something you probably can't correct.
I don't recommended to do this. If BGA don't care, then neither should you.

[kevan]

When BGA embeds a game's rules or tips on the BGA side of the site (whether below a live game or on the game information page), it uses the BGA CSS formatting rather than that of the wiki - which means that bullet points and list numbers (which I guess BGA doesn't use) are invisible and h3 headings look the same as h2 headings. There are also some issues with how BGA displays within-article links, and embedded images.

I started an unofficial wiki page to track issues and workarounds for them last year, at https://en.doc.boardgamearena.com/Wiki_formatting.

There are a couple of open bug reports at https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=16083 and https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=86652 - the missing bullet point issue has been outstanding since 2020, so it doesn't seem like a priority.