Markdown to BBCode Converter

Plenty of forums, bulletin boards, and game communities still run on BBCode — the [b]...[/b] tag syntax from the phpBB era — and do not understand Markdown. Write in comfortable Markdown and paste it here to get BBCode you can drop straight into a forum post.

How to use the Markdown to BBCode Converter

Type or paste Markdown on the left; the BBCode equivalent appears on the right as you type. Click Copy BBCode and paste it into your forum's post editor. The converter maps the common elements directly: **bold** becomes [b]bold[/b], *italic* becomes [i]italic[/i], ~~strikethrough~~ becomes [s]…[/s], links become [url=…]text[/url], and images become [img]…[/img].

Block elements are handled too. Markdown headings become bold lines, since BBCode has no universal heading tag; blockquotes become [quote]…[/quote]; bullet and numbered lists become [list] blocks with [*] items; and both inline code and fenced code blocks become [code]…[/code], with the code text passed through untouched so it is not mangled by the other rules.

Everything runs in your browser, so you can convert long posts or release notes without anything being uploaded.

BBCode versus Markdown

BBCode (Bulletin Board Code) is a lightweight markup language created in the late 1990s for phpBB and similar forum software. It wraps content in square-bracket tags that mirror HTML — [b] and [/b] for bold, [url] for links — but renders to a safe, restricted subset so users cannot inject arbitrary HTML into a page. For years it was the default way to format forum posts, and it is still everywhere: gaming communities, support boards, and legacy forums often accept BBCode and nothing else.

Markdown arrived later and won the wider web with a lighter, more readable syntax: asterisks and underscores instead of bracketed tags, so the source looks almost like finished text. The two systems express the same basic ideas — emphasis, links, lists, quotes, code — but with completely different markers, so text written for one is unreadable to the other. Authors who live in Markdown for their notes, READMEs, and chat constantly need to repost into BBCode-only forums, which is exactly the gap this converter fills.

The translation is mostly clean because the feature sets overlap, but a few mappings are pragmatic rather than exact. BBCode has no standardized heading tag, so Markdown headings are rendered as bold lines that still stand out visually. BBCode dialects also vary between forums — some support [size], [color], or nested lists differently — so the safest output sticks to the widely supported core tags. After pasting, glance at your forum's preview; if it supports richer tags, you can embellish from there, but the core conversion will render correctly almost anywhere.

Common use cases

• Cross-posting to forums. Reuse a Markdown announcement or guide on a BBCode-only board without rewriting it.
• Release notes and changelogs. Author once in Markdown and publish a formatted version to a community forum.
• Game and support communities. Format detailed posts with lists, quotes, and code for boards that only accept BBCode.
• Migrating content. Convert documentation written in Markdown into BBCode when moving it onto legacy forum software.