Many online forums use BBCode formatting, this means that you can use BBCode tags to customize your posts.
BBCode is a formatting standard created in 1998 to make it easier to use HTML styles in blogs and forums without having to master HTML. In practice, what happens under the hood is that BBCode tags are converted to HTML language before being interpreted by the browser. This represents an indirect way of writing in HTML, but with much greater ease and simplicity.
Another side benefit of BBCode formatting is security. If a forum allows any user to use pure HTML, there is a risk of unwanted malicious scripts being uploaded to the pages, which can compromise the structure of the site.
In this infographic we can see some of the most commonly used BBCode tags on the internet such as: bold formatting, tables, code, images, videos, quotes, text alignment and links.
The pattern is quite simple, just open a tag and then close it, using parentheses. The content that goes inside the tag tells you the type of HTML formatting that will be used.
