How to clean up postings in the Moodle forums

You’ll noticed if you copy your text from a wordprocessor, such as Microsoft Word, you’ll see a lot of extra text appear on your Moodle posting after you’ve added it to the forum. The chunk of additional text is generally formatting codes from that wordprocessor. The editor in Moodle will sometimes strip out what they think is bad code; it’s not technically “bad code,” but code Moodle doesn’t understand.

There are two ways to clean your posting up. The first way is to go back to your posting (you can do this step the first time you post to the forum) and click on the icon that looks like a paper with a blue W. It’s the icon third from the top right in the Moodle Editor (just above the area you enter your text). If you hover over this icon, it should say “Clean Word HTML.” This will remove some markup, but you will still need to clean up small traces of the markup. To remove the small traces, you need to click on the <> icon in the editor and delete the MS format (it’s usually this long chunk of text followed by an [endif!]). You can just delete that. Then click on the <> icon to return back to normal view. Click “Save changes” and you’re done!

Another way to prevent the markup from showing up in your forum posting is to open a simple text editor, such as Notepad, and copy the text that you wrote in MS Word and paste it into Notepad. Then copy the text again, this time from Notepad and paste it into the discussion forum. This will prevent MS formatting and markup from ever showing up in the forums.