Board Thread:Support Requests - Designing Your Wiki/@comment-39527011-20190728063644

per the information on that page, i'm trying to customize MediaWiki:Welcome-message-wall-user on a wiki where i am a sysop. the idea was to breathe some life into this feature by allowing individual sysops to customize the welcome message to better reflect their individual styles. i know this message supports wikitext markup because the default value contains wikitext markup, and per Help:Welcome_tool, $2 should be the message wall of the sysop the welcome message is being attributed to. with that in mind, i added this to the welcome message:

every part of this except $2 can be previewed in the page editor. replacing $2 with  generates a preview that works the way i expect it to. but the actual welcome messages generated by the welcome tool all use the fallback content. what am i missing? 