Inconsistent body format for issue notes

I'm a maintainer of git-bug, which interfaces with (primarily) the issues and issue notes APIs. we started receiving test failures yesterday (April 18 2025) with no change on our end. after digging into it, i discovered the root cause.

we have a test that creates a repository, creates some issues, fetches notes for those issues, and then deletes the repository. we parse the body field from the issue notes, and for "changed title" notes, do some additional parsing to extract the new title. until yesterday, the the body field's format was always "markdown-esque":

changed title from **some title** to **some title{+ edited+}**

now, for new issue notes, we are getting an HTML string:

<p>changed title from <code class=\"idiff\">some title</code> to <code class=\"
idiff\">some title<span class=\"idiff left right addition\"> edited</span></code></p>

i was unable to find release notes, a changelog, or any sort of documentation indicating this was going to be changed. i was equally unable to find an example of what the body field should look like for this sort of note in your API documentation.

i was able to adjust our parser and fix this test.

unfortunately, that led me to another issue: it appears that pre-existing notes appear to still be sent in the markdown-esque format:

$ cat /tmp/older-issue-note.json
{
  "body": "changed title from **some title** to **some title {+ changed+}**",
  "created_at": "2019-07-17T16:35:06.417Z",
  "updated_at": "2019-07-17T16:35:06.421Z"
}


$ cat /tmp/newer-issue-note.json
{
  "body": "<p>changed title from <code class=\"idiff\">some title</code> to <code class=\"
idiff\">some title<span class=\"idiff left right addition\"> changed</span></code></p>",
  "created_at": "2025-04-19T20:56:59.456Z",
  "updated_at": "2025-04-19T20:56:59.463Z"
}

in closing, i have these questions:

  1. where can i find release notes for the above change?
  2. is there a plan to deal with this inconsistency, or is this the expected and planned response format?
  3. is there an RSS feed i can subscribe to for changes to specific APIs?
Edited by sudoforge