Why it is three boxes and not four
Yesterday, today, blocked. The format survived because each line does a distinct job for someone other than you: yesterday shows movement, today surfaces collisions before two people start the same file, and blockers mark the place where somebody else can act. The third is the one that goes empty, and it is the expensive one to skip. A blocker you have not named yet reappears four days later as "that's still not done", by which point it needed a decision three days ago. It does not have to be a problem to be worth a line — "waiting on staging access" costs you eight words and often gets solved before the standup ends.
Carry-forward, and what it reads
Paste yesterday's post into the previous-post box with carry-forward on, and everything listed under its "today" heading moves into this morning's "yesterday". What the parser looks for is a short line — 24 characters or fewer — containing a word like yesterday, today, plan, blocked, blocker or waiting on, with items on the lines beneath it. Markdown noise (##, **, leading dashes) is stripped first, so a post copied out of a wiki reads the same as one copied out of chat. A bulleted line is always treated as content and never as a heading, even when the bullet text happens to contain the word "today" — which is the difference between carrying three items forward and carrying none.
Then edit. Things you carried across but did not actually finish get deleted from yesterday and retyped under today. Anything you typed into the yesterday box yourself is appended after the carried items, and exact duplicates collapse to one.
Issue keys and links
Two shapes are detected in the body text: an uppercase project key followed by a hyphen and digits, like WEB-142, and a bare #312. Both get listed. Supply a URL prefix and the markdown version turns each one into a proper link, while the chat version instead appends a plain list of URLs at the bottom. The split is deliberate — link syntax differs between chat clients and pasting markdown into the wrong one leaves visible brackets, whereas a bare URL gets auto-linked nearly everywhere.
The pattern is broad enough to catch things you did not mean. UTF-8 matches, and so does any all-caps abbreviation with a number after a hyphen. They show up in the detected list, which is where to check before posting.
Length is a feature of the format
Both versions are counted. Past roughly 1,200 characters most channels collapse the message and the part people read is the first four lines. That number is a rule of thumb from posts that got collapsed, not a limit anyone published. When you cross it, the fix that works is not merging items into longer sentences — it is moving detail into the issue itself and leaving the title in the standup. A short update with an issue key attached is more useful to a reader than a long one without, because it tells them where to go for the rest instead of making them read it whether they need it or not.
Questions people ask
I pasted my old post and nothing carried across.
The parser needs a heading line it can recognise — a short line containing something like "Today" or "Plan" — with the items on separate lines below it. A single line reading "Today: A, B, C" has no items underneath it to collect and yields nothing. Also confirm the carry-forward checkbox is on.
It picked up something that is not an issue key.
The pattern is an uppercase key of two or more characters, a hyphen, then digits — which also matches things like UTF-8 or A4-2. Everything it found is listed in the results so you can see it before posting. Rewrite the text or ignore the extra key; it changes nothing except the link list.
Does it save my updates?
No. Everything runs in the browser and a refresh clears the boxes. To use carry-forward tomorrow, the copy you posted to your channel is the archive — paste that back in.