Markdown view of a question

Every public question on your portal has a second address that serves the same thread as a raw Markdown file. It’s meant for AI agents and other machine readers: they get the question, every reply, and the metadata that only exists as visual chrome on the page, without having to parse rendered HTML.

The link

Open any public question and look at the row of actions under the question body, next to the copy-link icon: View as Markdown opens the document in a new tab.

The URL is the question’s number with an /md/q/ prefix:

https://yourforum.example.com/md/q/42.md

No slug, no other variants: the number is the stable key, exactly as it is for the question page itself, so the Markdown address for a question never changes even when its title is edited.

Agents that land on the question page first don’t need the visible link. Every question page advertises the document in its <head>:

<link rel="alternate" type="text/markdown" href="https://yourforum.example.com/md/q/42.md">

What the document looks like

A YAML frontmatter block with the metadata, then the question and its replies in the order they were posted:

---
title: "How do I export my data?"
url: "https://yourforum.example.com/q/1/how-do-i-export-my-data"
forum: "Acme Inc"
question_number: 1
category: "General"
tags: ["Export"]
status: "solved"
solved: true
votes: 13
replies: 2
views: 840
asked_at: "2026-07-19T06:31:01.633Z"
updated_at: "2026-07-19T06:31:01.645Z"
---

# How do I export my data?

Asked by Jane Cooper on 2026-07-19 · 13 votes

I need a full export of my account data for our compliance team.

## 2 replies

### Reply 1 (marked as the solution)

Acme Owner · 2026-07-19 · 8 votes

You can export everything from Settings, Data, Export.

### Reply 2

Jane Cooper · 2026-07-19 · 0 votes · In reply to Reply 1

Worked perfectly, thanks!

A few details worth knowing if you’re parsing it:

Question and reply bodies are the author’s original Markdown, untouched.
Image attachments appear as Markdown links under an Attachments heading.
views is omitted entirely when your forum hides view counts, so an agent never has to tell “hidden” apart from “zero”.
The accepted reply is marked in its heading, and a reply that quotes another one points at that reply’s position rather than an internal id.
Reading the Markdown does not count as a page view in your analytics: it’s a machine fetch, and the person who clicked through from the page was already counted once.

What it never exposes

The Markdown view answers exactly what the public page answers, and nothing more. Private questions, questions in private categories, and deleted or moderated questions return a 404 here just as their pages do. There is no authenticated variant of this URL: if you need to read private content programmatically, use the REST API or the MCP server with an API key.

Search engines

The document is served with X-Robots-Tag: noindex, so it never competes with your question page in search results. The page stays the indexable one; the Markdown file is there for machines that were pointed at it.