The helpful formatting buttons up above have other features (like [spoiler]) but not the [...] one (I’d use the real thing for demonstration, but… [gestures around])
Is there any ways to get a list of the plugins installed on this instance? I could poke at that to find out what’s possible to do, including the [...] (but maybe there’s others I could benefit from?). Or maybe we can list them on the FAQ/About/Welcome page?
Render it as a footnote, not as a clickable popup. I don’t know if Discourse has an option to do this, or if it’s something that could be added, but the current rendering is awful, IMO. Apart from anything else, you can’t quote something in a footnote in a reply.
So the “display footnotes inline” admin setting needs to be set to false? Which I guess is a site-wide setting, and hence we need to persuade the site admins to switch.
It seems like users should be able to decide on the flavor of footnotes. E.g. [^1] style would result in canonical footnotes and ^[...] would result in inline.
Person writing the post gets to decide, two different syntaxes.
Person reading the post gets to decide, user setting.
It’s a site configuration.
It appears (3) is the option that’s actually available to us right now. If someone wanted to get a change to Discourse, or a plugin, then I’d be happy with (2) as well. I don’t think I’d like (1), because of the “can’t quote a popup” problem I mentioned. But I imagine that’s even less likely to be available than (2).
I don’t have a horse in this race, I’ve seen both styles of footnote rendering online and both have advantages and disadvantages. The advantage of the current style is that reading the footnote doesn’t cause scroll jumps out of context.
Whenever a global change like this is made, you have to consider the people content with the current behavior. It might be a sizeable group, and quite possibly the majority. You’re not hearing from them simply because they are silent: they are content with things as they stand right now.
If you feel strongly about changing this, we can run a poll with users and see what they prefer.
That’s a good point. And furthermore, it’s easy to be aware of problems with the current approach, but not of things you wouldn’t like about the alternative. I hadn’t considered the scrolling issue.
A user configurable option would be better, but I don’t believe that’s available…
I really like the feature of being able to include a “parenthetical” note inline. XKCD (particularly in “What If”) does this with hover text - see for example Dropping a Mountain where all the images use titles in this way - and the current feature [1] serves that purpose very well. However, it doesn’t have to be called “footnotes” and I honestly think that that’s a poor name for them in this state If people want footnotes to be, well, footnotes, would it be possible to switch that option but to then have some OTHER notation that gets rendered as “click the three dots to show this text”?
If people want footnotes to be, well, footnotes, would it be possible to switch that option but to then have some OTHER notation that gets rendered as “click the three dots to show this text”?