SO IT’S A FOOTNOTE?!
(this space left intentionally blank as to not vioate the code of conduct with my exact thoughts after reading this)
testing ↩︎
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Ok, so back on topic… 
How do we expect people know this? Can it be included somewhere? (Obviously now if you search “ellipses” you’ll hopefully find this thread).
Again, I’ve already made a fool of myself. What can we do so that others don’t suffer my fate?
Well yeah, what about an inline popup doesn’t scream “footnote” to you? 
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Have this topic? 
What formatting is supported is covered by Supported formatting in posts (markdown, BBCode, and HTML) - users - Discourse Meta .
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.
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That link leads to this one which shows footnotes the same way the preview does.
Which only solidifies my “no, no, that’s not the feature you want”
Ah that link is EXACTLY what I’ve been looking for!
Bless you 
See also:
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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.
FWIW, I vote in favour of switching.
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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.
This is a test of [^1] [1]
Here is a footnote ↩︎
I’d also be in favour of this, the footnote behaviour is very unintuitive. @admins is this something we’d be able to test, please?
A
There’s 3 possibilities:
- 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.
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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”?
with the current configuration ↩︎
You must not think like that; you have done no such thing: it’s not obvious how this is done. In fact, this was one of the many things covered in this thread:
… and I still think that some sort of a “Forum Software User Guide” that pulls these things together, would be of considerable help to many Forum members, albeit a burden of work for someone to set up and maintain.
Perhaps we should document some of these things under the Discourse section on the devguide and link to it from https://discuss.python.org/faq?
The devguide is easier to edit (via PR) than the Discourse FAQ (admins only).
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FWIW, for reference, this previous thread discussed rendering inline vs. “true” footnotes in some detail:
There seemed to be a rough consensus in favor of rendering them as “true” footnotes given the usability issues folks like Paul highlighted with them (and while I was previously an advocate of the inline style, he convinced me to reconsider and lean somewhat in the other direction). But that discussion only captured a relatively modest slice of the most active members, and as Łukasz mentions, the ones who likely have more of an issue with the current display. Maybe it’s worth trying, though, and seeing what feedback we get?