Site Setting Request: Disable Inline Footnotes

[Pronoun]

I’d like to suggest disabling inline footnotes on the forum. I believe it can be disabled via the disable footnotes inline site setting accessible to admins.

Discourse comes with a built-in footnote plugin, with syntax that looks like this (either form works):

A sentence that needs a footnote. ^[The footnote] 
Another sentence that needs a footnote. [^1]

[^1]: The second footnote

Currently, footnotes are rendered ‘inline,’ which looks like this:

In contrast, non-inline footnotes look like this:

I realize this is, to a large extent, a matter of personal preference (and also isn’t that big of a deal). If most folks prefer the inline style, I’m more than happy to go with it. The main reasons why I prefer inline footnotes, however, are:

1. Footnotes are mostly used for writing that presents itself more formally, especially because these are forums for a region in a political simulator. I’ve only ever seen them used a few times outside the High Court (and those times were by me). I prefer non-inline footnotes for formal writing for two reasons:
   1. Readers of formal writing reasonably understand what a superscript number means when they see it; three horizontal dots don’t offer nearly that level of clarity. If the user experience for inline footnotes works well, it’s because people are sufficiently curious about the three dots to click on them, not because inline footnotes actually communicate that they are a footnote.
   2. Inline footnotes take up more space, interrupting the flow of text. If I was fine with that trade-off, I’d use in-text citations, which confer benefits like making it easy to see every cited source without clicking on every footnote and easy to include citations when quoting. If I want to use footnotes, I’d want to do so because footnotes are less obtrusive to the flow of text, and inline footnotes are counterproductive in that regard.
2. The editor preview still renders footnotes non-inline. Especially because inline footnotes aren’t intuitively recognizable as footnotes, this can produce confusion for users if their post preview and their actual post look noticeably different. I don’t know if they’d mind it after a few seconds once they figure out what’s going on, but it doesn’t hurt to make the preview and the actual post more similar.

I realize this is an incredible nitpick, so lastly just want to say — thanks for bearing with me

[Roavin]

Yup, found the setting.

I have no preference. I’ll leave it for a few days to see if anybody else has any arguments for or against. Poke me in a few days if I forget.

[Pronoun]

I guess I left it for more than a few days, oops. Here’s a poke