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Text Formatting

The FAWM website has several ways to format text in your songs, comments, profile, and forum posts for easy readability and website navigation. We support:

FAWM-Specific Markup

@Mentions

Type @username to flag a fawmer. The username becomes a clickable profile link:

Thanks @helga for such an awesome collab!

After you type @, you'll see autocomplete suggestions.

That fawmer also gets notified in their home feed when they are flagged in new comments and forum posts. If they change their username, the link will automatically update to the new one!

#Hashtags

Use #hashtags to easily tag and categorize your songs, profile, and other posts:

#Folk #Acoustic #FingerPicking

After you type #, you'll see autocomplete suggestions.

The first three (3) hashtags in a song's liner notes will be displayed in the songs list on your profile or the songs page. Tags are also searchable, so other fawmers can find songs with similar genres, instruments, moods, process, or challenges!

#Hashtag Normalization

The Internet has a variety of tagging conventions, from #lowercase to #CamelCase to #snake_case to #dash-tag and even the ever-dreaded #Camel_snake-dAsHtAg ...

FAWM will recognize them all! However, while FAWM preserves your original tag formatting in your post, we do convert all tags to #lowercase to simplify tag indexing and search.

Emoji

Certain keywords in between colons :: display emoji. For example, 😅 ❤️ 🤘 is written:

:sweat_smile: :heart: :sign_of_horns:

After you type :, you'll see autocomplete suggestions. FAWM will also simply display any emoji you enter or copy-paste into a text form, without this special formatting.

In general, any time you type a URL (or web address) beginning with http:// or https://, it automatically turns into a clickable link:

Check out the challenge at https://fawm.org/forums/12345

Videos

One exception to the URL rule above: YouTube video URLs (i.e., youtube.com or youtu.be) will automatically embed the target video in your post. This does not work for shorts!

Images

Another exception to the rule is image URLs. Any URL that ends with one of the following file extensions will automatically embed that image in your post instead:

  • .gif
  • .jpg or .jpeg
  • .png or .apng
  • .svg
  • .webp

Image Hosting

New for FAWM 2026!

As a thank-you benefit for fawmers who donate $25 or more, you can easily host images and insert them in your songs, bios, and other posts, directly from FAWM's file servers!

  • Drag and drop: Simply drag an image file from your computer and drop it onto any text area input. The image is uploaded and inserted at the cursor position.
  • Paste from clipboard: You can also paste images using CTRL + V on PC or CMD + V on Mac. This is handy for screenshots or images you've copied from other apps.
  • Mobile: You can also paste images from the "clipboard" on your phone or tablet. Go into your camera/photos app to "Copy" the image (this varies by device). Then tap-and-hold the cursor in the text area input on FAWM to bring up a menu that includes "Paste."

Once uploaded, the image URL is inserted using Markdown (see below) and appears in-line with the text of your song, comment, profile, or forum post!

Drag-and-drop image uploading

There is a 10MB file size limit, and images must be in one of the following formats:

  • .gif
  • .jpg or .jpeg
  • .png
  • .webp

Image hosting is for $25+ donors only

If you have not donated $25 or more, you can still embed images in your posts. However, you will need to host them on your own server, or use a third-party service like Imgur, Postimages, etc.

Markdown

New for FAWM 2026!

FAWM also supports a flavor of Markdown, a markup language for easily formatting plain text. If you frequent Slack, Discord, or Reddit, you're probably already familiar with it!

Cheat Sheet

Here's a cheat sheet for the most common Markdown elements:

What you type What you get
**bold** bold
_italic_ italic
~~strikethrough~~ strikethrough
[link text](https://example.com) link text
![alt text](image-url) image

Tip: Images and accessibility

When embedding images, you can used the full Markdown image syntax to add alt text, instead of plain image URLs. This makes your image more accessible to screen readers for the visually impaired:

![Home recording studio with keyboard, two speakers, and a condenser microphone on a boom arm.](image-url)

Block Quotes

Use > at the start of a line to create a quote:

> This is a quoted passage
> that spans multiple lines.

This can be useful for citing lyrics, prompts, or feedback from others!

Unordered Lists

Use -, *, or + followed by a space:

- First item
- Second item
- Third item

Ordered Lists

Use numbers followed by a period:

1. First step
2. Second step
3. Third step

Code and Preformatted Text

For code snippets or text that should preserve spacing exactly, use backticks `:

  • In-line code: `like this`
  • Code blocks: wrap with triple backticks (```)
```  
This is a code block.
Spacing is preserved exactly.
```

These can be useful if you're into ASCII Art!

Horizontal Rules

Create a horizontal divider with three or more dashes -, asterisks *, or underscores _:

---

What is not supported

For security and simplicity, some Markdown features are not available on FAWM:

  • HTML tags - Raw HTML is stripped for security
  • Headers (# Heading) - Use bold text instead for emphasis
  • Tables, footnotes, definitions, ... or other more advanced formatting

ChordPro Notation

New for FAWM 2026!

FAWM supports a special markup for displaying chords above your lyrics, inspired by ChordPro notation. Simply insert chord names in square brackets [] in-line with your text:

[G]Twinkle twinkle [C]little [G]star
[C]How I [G]wonder [D]what you [G]are

The chords will be displayed just above your the lyrics, making it easy for others to play along with your song — or for you to remember later!

ChordPro lyrics formatting

The site can recognize most common chord variations, comprising:

  • a capitalized root note, e.g., [C], [F#], or [Bb]
  • an optional qualifier, e.g., [Am] (minor), [Gaug] (augmented)
  • an optional extension, e.g., [D7], [Esus4]
  • an optional bass: slash / followed by another root note, e.g., [C/B]

This formatting can be useful for "open" collaborations or fakebook challenges, where another fawmer interprets the melody, tempo, or other elements to "finish" a song. If you already use other ChordPro-compatible software, this also makes it easy to copy-paste between apps!

What is not supported

For simplicity, we only support chord formatting in ChordPro notation. Title, song section, and syntax for other metadata are not recognized. You can simply use Markdown (see above) if you wish to add additional styling.

Chord detection only works for the Lyrics field of your songs.