activeness criteria

I think this is a great idea.

Sure thing, I'll post it tommorow night.

backticks

Some sites like reddit and Lemmy used 'markdown' style text formating, certain symbols tell Lemmy to format text differently (the Lemmy guide can be found by clicking that (?) button at the end of the formatting buttons in the top of the reply box).

Mardown sometimes tries to format text when you don't want to. If you just want Lemmy to ignore symbols then you can use a backslash to 'escape' the formatting character (e.g. I use \* to type *claps hands* instead of claps hands).

Markdown uses backticks to signal code formatting (intended for any data a computer would input or output). Single backticks are for small snippets of inline code and triple backticks are used to mark

  * multi- *
 ** line   **
 ** code   **
  * blocks *

Code formatting adds programming language syntax colouring, makes the letters all the same width ('monospaced') and, most importantly here, ignores markdown formatting which in this case would have normally turned that text all bold and italic.

My ballot template is markdown code for people to copy. I can't just type it out normally, or Lemmy would interpret all the formatting when I post it and you wouldn't have any formatting left to copy and paste! So the backticks tell Lemmy that it's code, don't format it normally.

The quadruple backticks are an advanced trick, I had to look up how to do it. My ballot template (markdown code) also has a code block nested inside it! The nested one is because I wanted the actual list of songs in a code block to make the boxes line up to look neater and be easier to read: [1], [2], [3] could be all different widths in some fonts but [1], [2], [3] are all the same. The quad backticks is kind of similar to double quoting, triple quoting, etc., adding more of a symbol to nest the formatting:

> > > triple
> >
> > double
>
> single

triple

double

single