If there is a button or menu item in the toolbar or a keyboard shortcut to format strikethrough text, I have not been able to find it.
So, after a couple hours reading about Markdown and its syntax, along with some general web searches, I’ve only come up with suggestions to use the tilde (~) symbol.
~This is a test of formatting strikethrough text!~ that doesn’t work This is a test of formatting strikethrough text!this is it!
You need to bracket the text with two ~ tilde symbols at each end with no spaces.
(To aid searching: strike-through, strike through, strikethru, strike-thru, strike thru)
I’ve heard of “Markdown” and used it a little years ago. The Reply box I’m seeing has a Markdown mode instead of an A mode. Maybe Markdown has a strikethru capability?
But then one might have to be fully Markdown and not A for most and M for parts…
I find that when Markdown doesn’t provide what I need, I can insert HTML markup. Some things (like styles) are blocked by Discourse, but it otherwise works.
strikethrough via Markdown and two tildes strikethrough via HTML <S>...</S> tags
This is how I sometimes generate small text, using HTML <SMALL> tags.
Interesting! is there a way, other than browser tools, to see a single Discourse Post’s source? I don’t see a button or any way to inspect a single post.
Browser tools won’t help - they’ll present the output of Discourse’s rendering content to HTML.
I was about to write that I usually select content of a post and click the “Quote” button to pull the source into a new edit window, where I can see it (and later Discard the post if I don’t want to reply to anything).
But that actually doesn’t work. When I tried it on my post, above, I found that Discourse changed my source.
Both of the strikethrough lines were quoted using the double-tilde (~~), discarding my HTML <S> tags. And it changed the case of my <SMALL> tags (to <small>).
So quoting text will help you see what Discourse is using, but that is not necessarily what the original poster wrote.
As you discovered, Markdown indeed uses two tildes at the front and then at the end of any text you want to use strikethrough. (It is two rather than one likely because tilde can mean approximately, so if you want to say between ~40 and ~100 you don’t want it to come out as 40 and 100.)
It used to be that this forum did not change the format of text from Markdown tags live, but now it does. If you surround text with asterisks, it will drop the asterisks and change the text to italic, for example.
OP here. Thank you for the Discourse Meta link covering formatting—it holds a wealth of useful information!
My general web searching provided a link to a discussion on the Discourse Meta forum where strikethrough was being discussed though none of the posts gave a complete and clear answer of how to use it. I now see, via your link, that had I explored the lefthand nav bar list I would have been able to find the same resource you link to.
Meta (as the Discourse support site is called) is a serious firehose, so I doubt hardly anyone would want to follow it regularly. Even I only dip in occasionally when I have a question or need to report a bug.
I’m glad everyone has figured out how to do strikethrough text in Markdown and HTML.
But when quoting that message (formatted with BBCODE), the formatting goes away altogether. With Markdown, it propagates (and with HTML, it is converted to Markdown).